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What is Debian?
Debian is an operating system which is composed primarily of free and open-source software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License, and developed by a group of individuals known as the Debian project. Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions for personal computers and network servers, and has been used as a base for several other Linux distributions.
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About this image
The debian:latest tag will always point the latest stable release (which is, at the time of this writing, debian:jessie). Stable releases are also tagged with their version (ie, debian:8 is an alias for debian:jessie, debian:7 is an alias for debian:wheezy, etc).
The rolling tags (debian:stable, debian:testing, etc) use the rolling suite names in their /etc/apt/sources.list file (ie, deb
http://httpredir.debian.org/debian testing main).
The mirror of choice for these images is the httpredir.debian.org redirecting mirror so that it's as close to optimal as possible, regardless of location or connection. See the httpredir homepage for more information.
If you find yourself needing a Debian release which is EOL (and thus only available from archive.debian.org), you should check out the debian/eol image, which includes tags for Debian releases as far back as Potato (Debian 2.2), the first release to fully utilize APT.
How It's Made
If you are curious about what goes into creating this image, please see contrib/mkimage.sh in github.com/docker/docker (and contrib/mkimage/debootstrap in the same repo).
Additional interesting information is provided in files on the dist branch of the relevant repository, namely the exact command used to build (SUITE/build-command.txt), a full log of the build itself (SUITE/build.log), and the "build manifest" (SUITE/build.manifest, which lists the version numbers of all the packages included in the rootfs tarball).