Interacting with Docker containers

Linux container technologies, especially Docker, have grown in popularity in recent years, and this has continued since the previous edition of this book was published. Containers provide a fast path to resource isolation while maintaining the consistency of the runtime environment. They can be launched quickly and are efficient to run, as there is very little overhead involved. Utilities such as Docker provide a lot of useful tooling for container management, such as a registry of images to use as the filesystem, tooling to build the images themselves, clustering orchestration, and so on. Through its ease of use, Docker has become one of the most popular ways to manage containers, though others, such as Podman and LXC, are becoming much more prevalent. For now, though, we will focus on Docker, given its broad appeal and wide install base.

Ansible can interact with Docker in numerous ways as well. Notably, Ansible can be used to build...