Docker allows developers to package applications into standardized units called containers to improve portability, reduce costs, and increase deployment speed and agility. Containers isolate applications from other applications and infrastructure, allowing them to run anywhere regardless of the underlying infrastructure. With Docker, developers can build and test code in their local environments and then deploy the same container to production, reducing configuration mismatches between environments. Docker uses containerization and virtualization to package applications and their dependencies into lightweight, portable containers that can run on any infrastructure.