To get the most out of this book

In this book, we will use different open source tools to create, run, and share software containers. The book presents different options for the labs, and you can choose the environment in which you feel more comfortable. To follow the labs in this book, you will need the following:

• A common laptop or desktop computer with a modern CPU (Intel Core i5 or i7, or an equivalent AMD CPU) and 16 GB of RAM is recommended. You would probably be able to run the labs with lower resources, but your experience may be impacted.
• A Microsoft Windows or Linux operating system. Although Linux will be referred to in this book, you can use either.
• You are expected to have some user-level knowledge of Linux/Windows.
• Some experience in coding in common programming languages, such as Go, JavaScript, Java, or .NET Core, will be useful, although the examples are not complicated and will be easy to follow.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
Docker and other software container tools	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Docker Swarm orchestrator	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Kubernetes orchestrator desktop environments, such as Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, and Minikube	Windows, macOS, or Linux
Tools for monitoring, logging, and tracing, such as Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and OpenTelemetry	Windows, macOS, or Linux

The Kubernetes features used during the labs will work on any of the aforementioned operating system options. If any special characteristics are expected from the underlying platform, they are described in the lab.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.