The rapid digital transformation of modern enterprises has driven a decisive shift from traditional virtualization toward lightweight, scalable, and high-performance containerized environments. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of Docker’s OS-level virtualization model and Kubernetes’ orchestration capabilities, establishing their combined architecture as the dominant foundation for cloud-native application delivery. The study contrasts containers with hypervisor-based Virtual Machines (VMs), revealing substantial advantages in startup latency, CPU and memory efficiency, and near-native I/O performance. Quantitative evaluations confirm that Docker significantly reduces deployment delays, enhances resource density, and improves throughput, while Kubernetes delivers self-healing, automated scaling, declarative lifecycle management, and superior deployment reliability. Real-world applications—including micro services, CI/CD pipelines, multi-cloud strategies, and machine learning workloads—demonstrate the strategic value and operational robustness of this ecosystem. The paper also addresses limitations involving kernel-shared security, operational complexity, and compatibility constraints, while highlighting emerging trends such as Container-as-a-Service (CaaS), server less containers, AI-driven orchestration, and edge-optimized deployments. Overall, the research concludes that the integration of Docker and Kubernetes provides the definitive architecture for future cloud systems, enabling unmatched agility, performance, and scalability across diverse enterprise workloads.