Quick note: configuration in Docker

Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned that Docker is often the exception when it comes to configuration. Because Docker containers are a much more minimal environment, they don’t have a lot of the extra binaries, services, and configuration files that you’ll find in a traditional Unix system. But because much of the software that software developers create now runs in containers, as opposed to traditional, full operating system environments, we want to cover some basics here to make sure you’ve got an intuition for how configuration is different in Docker containers. We’ll dig much deeper into Docker containers in general in Chapter 15, Containerizing Applications with Docker.

In a container environment – whether it’s Docker or another container runtime – you’re dealing with a dramatically smaller environment. There are very few installed programs and utilities, a dramatically stripped...