It's almost impressive that Docker-on-macOS works so seamlessly that people are downvoting this comment. Yes, Docker containers run in a Linux VM on macOS. It's just one though, and generally seems fine on low resource workstations, unlike Vagrant setups from a few years ago that tried to run a VM for every application.

It's not a VM, which is the point of docker in the first place.

I agree, though, that it's next to unusable on a low-power dual-core system like the MBA if only for limited RAM.

docker on mac does indeed leverage a VM as the docker host, since a Linux kernel is required

To my understanding Docker doesn't do hardware virtualisation and doesn't run indiviual VMs per container instance, though, or does it?

it does not, but there is still some overhead running a single linux VM for the docker host on macOS

> Doesn't docker spin up an entire vm for containers?

(It generally does not. Instead it uses more lightweight isolation primtives. That has always been one of its main selling points.)

EDIT: see reply

> That does seem pretty heavy for a MBA of any generation?

It very much depends on what you are running inside the containers. I regularly have a dev environment with ~8 relatively lightweight containers running on my Early 2014 MBA without any problems.

Docker for Mac very much uses a VM. It's as lightweight as it can be (using the OS-supplied hypervisor, not something third party), but still a VM.

The context is on MacOS. Docker is a Linux technology, it runs Linux containers, thus it requires a Linux VM to run Docker on a Mac.