Setting up a development environment for microservices

One of the greatest benefits of using Docker and its container ecosystem is that you don't need to install anything else on your machine. For example, if you need a MySQL database, you don't need to install anything on your local dev; it is easier to spin a container with the version you want and start using it.

This way of developing is more flexible, therefore we will be working with Docker containers throughout the whole book. In this section, we will learn how to build a basic Docker environment; it will be our foundation and we will be improving and adapting this base to each of our microservices in the subsequent chapters.

To simplify the folder structure of our project, we will have some root folders on our development machine:

• Docker: This folder will contain all the Docker environment
• Source: This folder will have the source of each of our microservices
  

Note that this structure is flexible and can be changed...