Look at that, I’m back!

The previous post covered how I got things up and running for this blog, but didn’t go into much depth about what I used and what exactly it all is. This (hopefully series) is going to be outlining the basics of Docker, mainly Docker Swarm, and why I find it awesome. Keep in mind, these are my views and opinions, you’re welcome to give me feedback on places where I am incorrect.

What really is Docker?

Docker is a tool designed to allow running and deployment of applications in containers. (at least that’s how I understand it). A container allows the developer of an application to take all the requirements for that application and essentially “zip” it all up together and ship it out as a single entity.

This makes it a lot easier to create and deploy a service as a standalone package, that can essentially be run on any sort of infrastructure as long as docker is up and running.

As a good example of this, I could essentially take this blog, create a custom image of the parameters and data, create a Docker image of it, and move it to any cloud platform supporting Docker, and it would run correctly, with little to no configuration.

Getting Docker installed is easy:

For the purposes of this, I will be using an instance with Ubuntu 16.04 installed, so these commands are based off that OS.

Getting Docker installed is a quick and painless process on Ubuntu, simply run apt-get install docker followed by apt-get install docker.io.

Once you’ve done this, you can run docker ps which is one of the most basic Docker commands, it should give you the following output:

CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES

This is essentially saying “Docker is up and running, no containers are up!” which is good news!

Now that we have an installation of Docker up and running, and we are ready to go, we can move onto actually starting up a test container, which I will go into in a future post…coming soon…

Resources:

If you’d like to know more about Docker, you can find their website here: https://www.docker.com/