What this book covers

Chapter 1, Preparing Docker Hosts, helps you familiarize yourself with Docker Engine and how to prepare a Docker host. We will then build a PKI to ensure secure communication between our Docker host and our Docker client workstation. We will also build a small Docker Swarm cluster, consisting of multiple Docker hosts.

Chapter 2, Configuring Docker with Chef, shows how to automate the configuration of our Docker deployments. We will also use Chef, a piece of configuration management software, to manage Docker hosts in scale.

Chapter 3, Monitoring Docker, helps us to understand the importance of monitoring and collecting metrics in Prometheus. We will also learn how to consolidate logs in an ELK stack.

Chapter 4, Optimizing Docker Images, discusses optimizing our Docker images and improving our development workflow. We will also learn to reduce image deployment time and improve image build time.

Chapter 5, Deploying Containers, looks at how we can use Jenkins to build, distribute, and deploy our containerized application. We will also learn to build and deploy a simple application using a three-stage pipeline.

Chapter 6, Benchmarking, helps us create benchmarks to gauge the performance of our Docker application.

Chapter 7, Load Balancing, talks about how to scale out our Docker applications to increase our capacity. We will use load balancers, which are a key component in the architecture of various web scale applications. We will also learn to balance load with NGINX.

Chapter 8, Troubleshooting Containers, inspects containers with Docker exec, and help us understand what debugging is, along with other container debugging tools.

Chapter 9, Onto Production, wraps up the book by teaching us how to perform web operations. We will also learn to deploy and scale our applications.