Docker: Up & Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. The Path to Production Containers

Now that we’ve explored tooling for bringing up a stack of containers on a single host, we need to look at how we’d do this in a large scale production environment. In this chapter, our goal is to show you how you might take containers to production based on our own experiences. There are a myriad of ways in which you will probably need to tailor this to your own applications and environments, but this all should provide you with a solid starting point to help you understand the Docker philosophy in practical terms.

Getting to Production

Getting an application from the point where it is built and configurable to the point where it is actually running on production systems is one of the most mine-ridden steps in going from zero to production. This has traditionally been complicated but is vastly simplified by the shipping container model. If you can imagine what it was like to load goods into a ship to take across the ocean before shipping containers existed, you have a sense of what most traditional deployment systems look like. In that old shipping model, randomly-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 ...