What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Move to Containers, introduces containers. Containers are in vogue lately, and though the concept is well understood, it is worth introducing to you the book's scope and how containers are changing the current IT landscape. As containers are a relatively new concept, it is imperative that we understand the best practices and techniques surrounding the building, deploying, and securing of container-based applications.
Chapter 2, Containerization with Docker, will introduce Docker and cover installing Docker, configuring Docker storage drivers, running our first Docker container, and monitoring Docker with journald and Splunk.
Chapter 3, Creating and Managing Container Images, covers Docker images. Docker images are one of the key components when working with Docker. In this chapter, we will learn about Docker images, the layered model, Dockerfile directives, how to flatten images, building images, and the best practices surrounding image building. We will also look at distroless images and how they are good from a DevSecOps perspective.
Chapter 4, Container Orchestration with Kubernetes – Part I, introduces Kubernetes. We will install Kubernetes using Minikube and KinD, talk a bit about Kubernetes' architecture, and then move on to the fundamental building blocks of Kubernetes, which include Pods, containers, ConfigMaps, secrets, and multi-container Pods.
Chapter 5, Container Orchestration with Kubernetes – Part II, moves on to the advanced concepts of Kubernetes, including networking, DNS, Services, Deployments, Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, and StatefulSets.
Chapter 6, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, introduces IaC with Terraform and explains the core concepts of IaC. We will then move on to a hands-on example where we will be building a resource group and a virtual machine from scratch on Azure using Terraform while understanding the core Terraform concepts.
Chapter 7, Configuration Management with Ansible, introduces configuration management with Ansible and explains its core concepts. We will then learn about the core Ansible concepts when configuring a MySQL and Apache application on Azure Virtual Machines.
Chapter 8, IaC and Config Management in Action, talks about immutable infrastructure using Packer and uses this, along with the concepts of Chapter 5, Container Orchestration with Kubernetes – Part II, and Chapter 6, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Terraform, to boot up an IaaS-based Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) stack on Azure.
Chapter 9, Containers as a Service (CaaS) and Serverless Computing for Containers, looks at how Kubernetes forms a hybrid between IaaS and PaaS approaches. But when we don't want to manage infrastructure and want something lightweight to host our container, we can look at serverless container services such as AWS ECS. We will also briefly discuss alternatives such as Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Instances. We will then discuss Knative, which is an open source, cloud-native, serverless technology.
Chapter 10, Continuous Integration, looks at continuous integration from a container perspective and talks about various tools and techniques for continuously building a container-based application. We will look at tools such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and AWS Cloud Build and discuss how and when to use each of them.
Chapter 11, Continuous Deployment/Delivery with Spinnaker, looks into continuous deployment/delivery using Spinnaker. Spinnaker is a modern continuous delivery tool that helps you deploy and manage your container application seamlessly.
Chapter 12, Securing the Deployment Pipeline, explores multiple ways of securing a container deployment pipeline, including managing secrets, storing secrets, container image analysis, vulnerability scanning, and binary authorization.
Chapter 13, Understanding DevOps with GitOps, looks at the GitOps approach for doing DevOps and how it is expanding in popularity.
Chapter 14, CI/CD Pipeline with GitOps, gets hands-on and sees you create a complete CI/CD pipeline using the GitOps approach. We will look at tools such as GitHub Actions and Flux CD.
