What this book covers

Chapter 1, Containers – Not Just Another Buzzword, examines what the current approaches are to deploying services and why containers, and Docker specifically, are eclipsing other forms of infrastructure deployment. 

Chapter 2, Rolling Up the Sleeves, covers all the necessary steps to set up and run a small local service based on Docker. We will cover how to install Docker, run it, and get a quick overview of the Docker CLI. With that knowledge, we will write a basic Docker container and see how to run it locally.

Chapter 3, Service Decomposition, covers how to take the knowledge from the previous chapter and use it to create and build additional of a database and an app server container, mirroring simple decomposed microservice deployments.

Chapter 4, Scaling the Containers, talks about scaling horizontally with multiple instances of the same container. We will cover service discovery, how to deploy one to make the scaling of a module transparent to the rest of the infrastructure, and its various pros and cons depending on the implementation, with a quick look into horizontal node scaling.

Chapter 5, Keeping the Data Persistent, covers data persistence for your containers. We will cover node-local storage, transient storage, and persistent volumes and their intricacies. We will also spend a bit more time on Docker image layering and some pitfalls.

Chapter 6, Advanced Deployment Topics, adds isolation and messaging to the cluster to increase the security and stability of the services. Other security consideration in Docker deployments and their trade-offs will be covered here.

Chapter 7, The Limits of Scaling and the Workarounds, covers all the issues that you might come across as you scale beyond your basic RESTful service needs. We will dig deep into the issues that you will find with default deployments and how to work around them with minimal hassle, along with handling code version changes and higher-level management systems.

Chapter 8, Building Our Own Platform, helps us build our own mini Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in this chapter. We will cover everything from configuration management to deployment in a cloud-based environment that you can use to bootstrap your own cloud.

Chapter 9, Exploring the Largest-Scale Deployments, covers what we built up, and extends into the theoretical and real-world examples of the largest-scale deployments of Docker it also covers any development on the horizon that the reader should keep an eye out for.