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I keep seeing these two terms used almost interchangeably in documentation and tutorials, but I'm struggling to pin down the exact distinction. When someone says they "built a Docker container," are they actually referring to the image, or is there a real runtime difference I should care about for deployment?
From what I gather, an image is a static template—like a snapshot with layers and a manifest—while a container is the running instance of that image. But in practice, how much does this distinction matter when you're writing a docker-compose.yml or pushing to a registry? Does Docker handle the image-to-container conversion automatically, or are there scenarios where you need to manage them separately?
