AWS supports deploying Docker images on both Elastic Beanstalk and their new Elastic Container Service. While it doesn't completely remove the need to worry about VMs, it does abstract them away somewhat (ECS much more so).
Does the docker image run directly on their base virtualization platform or does it run on top of another OS (that I install) that runs on their virtualization platform? I have an OS in my docker image already, so..
But you don't have an OS in your docker image really. There's no kernel, no init or system services running if you don't do that yourself. A running docker container is just a process on the host OS with it's own environment.
ECS abstracts this away, and from your perspective, containers are running on their virtualization platform.
The "OS" part of a Docker image is really just a minimal environment that "looks and feels" like Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. You're not actually virtualizing a full OS. Running a Docker image is essentially equivalent to running a process (whatever process is defined by your image, i.e. Apache, MySQL, etc.).
