Docker is an open source project to build, ship and run any application as a lightweight container. Docker containers are both hardware-agnostic and platform-agnostic. This means they can run anywhere, from your laptop to the largest EC2 compute instance and everything in between - and they don't require you to use a particular language, framework or packaging system. That makes them great building blocks for deploying and scaling web apps, databases, and backend services without depending on a particular stack or provider.