Docker for Beginners

Hi everyone,<p>Author here. There are a bunch of awesome[0] tutorials on Docker so why another one? Well, my motivation was to have a guide (for myself and for others) on how to deploy dockerized apps on the cloud. So in this tutorial, apart from giving an intro to docker, I demonstrate how to use Elastic Beanstalk for single-container and ECS for multi-container deployments.<p>Here&#x27;s are the two apps we deploy on AWS for example<p>1. Catnip - A simple flask app (single-container): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catnip.elasticbeanstalk.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;catnip.elasticbeanstalk.com&#x2F;</a><p>2. Foodtrucks - A simple app to discover foodtrucks in SF (Flask + Elasticsearch in multi-containers): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf-foodtrucks.xyz&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf-foodtrucks.xyz&#x2F;</a><p>I&#x27;m new to Docker myself so I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;ve made mistakes. Let me know if you have ideas on how to improve this!<p>[0] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docker.atbaker.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;docker.atbaker.me&#x2F;</a>

ECS is really the only way I&#x27;d go with Docker - So far in my experience, Docker in production is <i>really</i> a lot harder than the casual developer &#x2F; devops person realizes based on the &quot;getting started with docker&quot; tutorials.<p>My conclusion with Docker is that, in general™, you really need to have a justifiable reason to go whole-hog into Docker, especially if you&#x27;re not on AWS &#x2F; considering ECS.<p>I&#x27;m glad the article covers ECS, as it makes a lot of the scheduling &#x2F; config issues simpler!

The weak part of Docker is volume&#x2F;data management and it is interesting that the article almost never mentioned it. There are solutions that attach networking storage to containers, but that just adds a latency to the application. If one wants access to the fast local storage, then Docker requires significant extra efforts to set things up.

I still don&#x27;t know how to give docker an IP address or &quot;physical&quot; network card on my network.<p>I was able to do this very easily with solaris zones, and even BSD jails, but every installation of docker that is any way integrated into packages seems to be unable to do this.<p>perhaps I&#x27;m simply not using the right google search terms.

While the technical tutorial is good, I can&#x27;t say anyone should choose Docker for the reasons outlines in the &quot;Why should I use it?&quot; section. &quot;Because its popular&quot; will only give you a headache when you are trying to deploy your simple rails app.

Prakhar, this is phenomenal. I&#x27;m a Columbia student as well and actually just came across your blog with this article. Hope to meet up at some point!<p>This is definitely a great start to Docker and I like how you provided an application to allow the reader to just work through the process of deploying something. Will definitely recommend this, as Docker is something easier shown than explained. Great stuff man!

I&#x27;m always surprised to see a comparison to Virtual Machines. The containers seem more like an enhanced chroot jail than a CPU emulator, and I&#x27;ve always used those for the similar purpose of isolating a tricky build environment.<p>They even have some of the same restrictions(Docker needs root, as does chroot; they both work by making system calls lie to the process).<p>Whenever I hear a comparison with VMs, I wonder for a second, &quot;Wait, is there some clever way to invoke the virtualization instructions without evicting references to the OS from the CPU&#x27;s context to provide isolation without a separate guest OS?&quot;

As a Docker noob, it would be so useful if there was a list of Docker use-cases that someone could link to?

Docker does great marketing but to my knowledge I can&#x27;t use the toolbox to effortlessly (without Vagrant) set up a non-trivial microservice <i>development</i> flow on my Mac yet.<p>On the deployment side there are also still lots of inconsistencies between the different tools but I can see it becoming the go-to pragmatic way to bootstrap your private &quot;cloud&quot; very soon.<p>Again deployment is only part of the solution and I wish Docker would hire more good people to work on different development &quot;best-practices&quot; for Linux <i>as well as OSX</i>.<p>If Docker eventually wants to become a major service provider they should complement that kind of tooling with the same vigorous level of documentation and blogging as Heroku, Digital Ocean, Codeship and the likes come up with consistently.

neat article. I didn&#x27;t know now you can run Docker on EB!!<p>I recommend start with Docker Machine (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.docker.com&#x2F;machine&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.docker.com&#x2F;machine&#x2F;</a>)<p>Another well-written beginner tutorial (but with a few hardcoded urls): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackengine.com&#x2F;docker-101-01-docker-development-environments&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackengine.com&#x2F;docker-101-01-docker-development-envi...</a>

awesome - very well written m8

I still prefer using automation like ansible or saltstack over docker. You can&#x27;t run it on very popular OpenVZ VPS and it&#x27;s another useless layer of abstraction with security holes in it.