The de facto standard for packaging AI workloads. By 2026, Docker (and the OCI ecosystem) underpins reproducible model serving, GPU-enabled containers, and the
Docker remains the packaging standard of software, and AI made it more central: model servers, agents, and eval harnesses all ship as containers, while Docker's AI features (Model Runner, agent sandboxes) target the new workloads directly. Reproducibility is the currency of AI ops, and containers mint it.
Pricing: Free for individuals; Pro/Team/Business subscriptions (~$5–24/user/month) for Desktop licensing and registry features (published pricing, mid-2026).
AI stacks are dependency nightmares (CUDA, drivers, libs): containers make them reproducible across dev/CI/prod, and sandboxed containers are the standard safety boundary for agent-executed code.
GPU passthrough is mature (NVIDIA toolkit), but image size and driver/CUDA alignment demand care; slim bases and multi-stage builds keep inference images deployable.