Docker is a popular way of containerizing and shipping software. The advantage of Docker is that the software that is dockerized and runs inside a light-weight container that has a small overhead compared to a virtual machine. As a result of its reduced overhead and large pool of publicly available Docker images, Docker is a great way to run software in production in a predictable way without the need of much configuration.

Official Elasticsearch Docker images are available for download in different flavors:

• Elasticsearch with basic X-Pack license
• Elasticsearch with full X-Pack license and 30-day evaluation
• Open source version of Elasticsearch without X-Pack

Getting started with an Elasticsearch instance running inside Docker is as easy as installing Docker and running the docker pull command with the Elasticsearch image of your choice. The following simple commands will get your single-node Elasticsearch 7.0.1 up and running if you have Docker installed on your system:

docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.0.1

docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.0.1

Docker is a highly recommended way of running applications in a predictable way in production. You can find out more about how to run Elasticsearch in Docker in a production environment in the documentation—https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.0/docker.html.