Docker image from Ubuntu 16.04 to CentOS 6.9

Question

I am interested in creating a Docker image from Ubuntu 16.04 (Kernel 4.15.0-29-generic) to be run on a CentOS 6.9 (Kernel 2.6.32-696.30.1.el6.x86_64).

Are they compatible to run smoothly?

Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

CentOS 6 will not run any version of Docker "smoothly"; the last Docker version that even has a build for CentOS 6 is very old and even then there are kernel compatibility issues. I'd update your host to something newer.

Once you get past that, there aren't usually any substantial issue running different Linux distributions between the host and in containers. You'll routinely see hosts running very minimal distributions (for instance there isn't much in the boot2docker distribution that Docker Machine VMs use), and images frequently run very light-weight distributions such as Alpine or even have nothing resembling a "Linux distribution" at all.