Docker: Up & Running

Chapter 7. The Path to Production Containers

In this chapter, we cover some of the ideas around deploying and testing containers in production. This chapter is intended to show you how you might take containers to production based on our experience doing so. There are a myriad of ways in which you will probably need to tailor this to your own application and environment. The purpose of this chapter is really to provide a starting point and to help you understand the Docker philosophy in practical terms.

Deploying

Deployment, which is often the most mine-ridden of the steps in getting to production, is made vastly simpler by the shipping container model. If you can imagine what it was once like to load goods into a ship to take across the ocean before shipping containers existed, you can get a sense of what most deployment systems look like. In that old shipping model, random-sized boxes, crates, barrels, and all manner of other packaging were all loaded by hand onto ships. They then had to be manually unloaded by someone who could tell which pieces needed to be unloaded first so that the whole pile wouldn’t collapse like a Jenga puzzle.

Shipping containers changed all that: we have a standardized box with well-known dimensions. These containers can be packed and unloaded in a logical order and whole groups of items arrive together when expected. This is the Docker deployment model. All Docker containers support the same external interface, and the tooling just drops them on the ...