Running Docker in Production Requires More Than Just Starting Containers

A container that starts successfully is not automatically production-ready, as real-world reliability depends on handling failures, resource constraints, and observability. Without memory and CPU limits, a single container can exhaust host resources and disrupt other workloads running on the same system. Docker health checks allow teams to distinguish between a running container and a genuinely healthy application, since a process can be alive while the app inside is hung or returning errors. Restart policies help recover from crashes automatically, but an unhealthy container that keeps running requires external orchestration or monitoring tools to act on health status changes. Together, resource limits, health checks, and restart policies form the foundation of a production-grade Docker deployment.