Chapter 1: The Move to Containers

This first chapter will provide you with background knowledge of containers and how they change the entire IT landscape. While we understand that most DevOps practitioners will already be familiar with this, it is worth providing a refresher to build the rest of this book's base. While this book does not entirely focus on containers and their orchestration, modern DevOps practices heavily emphasize it.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• The need for containers
• Container architecture
• Containers and modern DevOps practices
• Migrating to containers from virtual machines

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand and appreciate why we need containers in the first place and what problems they solve.
• Understand the container architecture and how it works.
• Understand how containers contribute to modern DevOps practices.
• Understand the high-level steps of moving from a Virtual Machine-based architecture to containers.