Overlay2 – preferred storage driver for all currently supported Linux distributions, and requires no extra configuration.
fuse-overlayfs – preferred only for running Rootless Docker on a host that does not provide support for rootless overlay2
btrfs and zfs – The btrfs and zfs storage drivers allow for advanced options, such as creating “snapshots”, but require more maintenance and setup. Each of these relies on the backing filesystem being configured correctly
Vfs – Intended for testing purposes, and for situations where no copy-on-write filesystem can be used.
Aufs – Preferred storage driver for Docker 18.06 and older, when running on Ubuntu 14.04 on kernel 3.13 which had no support for overlay2.
Devicemapper – storage driver requires direct-lvm for production environments, because loopback-lvm, while zero-configuration, has very poor performance.
Overlay – Used for kernels that did not support the “multiple-lowerdir” feature required for overlay2. It is deprecated.