Container and Docker Fundamentals

Docker and Amazon Web Services are two of the hottest and most popular technologies available right now.  Docker is the most popular container platform on the planet right now, while Amazon Web Services is the number 1 public cloud provider.  Organizations both large and small are adopting containers en masse, and the public cloud is no longer the playground of start-ups, with large enterprises and organizations migrating to the cloud in droves. The good news is that this book will give you practical, real-world insights and knowledge of how to use both Docker and AWS together to help you test, build, publish, and deploy your applications faster and more efficiently than ever before.

In this chapter, we will briefly discuss the history of Docker, why Docker is so revolutionary, and the high level architecture of Docker.  We will describe the various services that support running Docker in AWS, and discuss why you might choose one service over another based upon the requirements of your organization.

We will then focus on getting your local environment up-and-running with Docker, and install the various software prerequisites required to run the sample application for this book.  The sample application is a simple web application written in Python that stores data in a  MySQL database, and this book will use the sample application to help you solve real-world challenges such as testing, building, and publishing Docker images, as well as deploying and running Docker applications in a variety of container management platforms on AWS. Before you can package the sample application as a Docker image, you need to understand the application's external dependencies and the key tasks that are required to test, build, deploy, and run the application, and you will learn how to install application dependencies, run unit tests, start the application up locally, and orchestrate key operational tasks such as establishing the initial database schema and tables required for the sample application to run.  

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Introduction to containers and Docker
• Why containers are revolutionary
• Docker architecture
• Docker in AWS
• Setting up a local Docker environment
• Installing the sample application