Chapter 1. Getting Started with Docker

These days, Docker technology is gaining more market and more mind shares among information technology (IT) professionals across the globe. In this chapter, we would like to shed more light on Docker, and show why it is being touted as the next best thing for the impending cloud IT era. In order to make this book relevant to software engineers, we have listed the steps needed for crafting highly usable application-aware containers, registering them in a public registry repository, and then deploying them in multiple IT environments (on-premises as well as off-premises). In this book, we have clearly explained the prerequisites and the most important details of Docker, with the help of all the education and experiences that we could gain through a series of careful implementations of several useful Docker containers in different systems. For doing this, we used our own laptops as well as a few leading public Cloud Service Providers (CSP).

We would like to introduce you to the practical side of Docker for the game-changing Docker-inspired containerization movement.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• An introduction to Docker
• Docker on Linux
• Differentiating between containerization and virtualization
• Installing the Docker engine
• Understanding the Docker setup
• Downloading the first image
• Running the first container
• Running a Docker container on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Troubleshooting the Docker containers