Containers

Docker is a Container management kit allowing users to create, publish, and run image thumbprints with a variety of apps & software stack in them.

For a person from OOPS background, an image is like a template class and a Container is a realistic Object that runs that template. You can create a Postgres Container or a Tomcat container in a second by just one command.  The images themselves are stored in a repository, Docker has DockerHub, and AWS has ECR. In fact, DockerHub has official images from most of the vendors. It was never so easy anytime before to spin a software app environment as a container. Containers will change the way you look at various aspects

A) Build once and run anywhere concept is so cool, You build it just once the first time and then you can run the same container easily in any other host on-premises or on the cloud. It's a must-have for DevOps

B) Containers simplify a lot of things. As a developer, you don’t need to worry about setting up the environment, software versions, and all the packaged libraries each time, you just configure it in Dockerfile and build an image that’s it

D) The concept of stacking images is so organized, the base image can be alpine, ubuntu & then you stack a tomcat layer and the final layer will be your App

E) Containers can scale, the Orchestration of containers will change the way you look at deployment. Of course, Kubernetes is the best Orchestrator but don’t write off Docker Swarm. Docker Swarm is far easier to set up and get it to work

F) Optimized usage of resources. You can run multiple containers on a host and the orchestrator can decide when to add additional nodes

G) The way you look at Networking, Security, performance changes quite a bit from our traditional non-container based solutions

Docker has made containers sound so simple that you will love it once you start using it. If you are not aware of Containers you are missing something. So get started today!

References:

• Docker: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/
• If you want to learn the best: I recommend Niguel Poulton he has a great “Docker deep dive” book and video course in Pluralsight. Thank you @niguelpoulton

Thanks,

Mahesh