Docker-in-Practice.pdf

In September 2013, while browsing Hacker News, I stumbled across an article in Wired about a new technology called “Docker.” 1 As I read it, I became increasingly excited as I realized Docker’s revolutionary potential. The company I’d worked at for over a decade was struggling to deliver software quickly enough. Provisioning environments was a costly, time-consuming, manual, and inelegant affair. Continuous integration was barely existent, and setting up devel- opment environments was an exercise in patience. As my job title included the words “DevOps Manager,” I was peculiarly motivated to solve these problems! I recruited a couple of motivated coworkers (one of them now my coauthor) via a company mailing list, and together our skunkworks team labored to turn a beta tool into a business advantage, reducing the high costs of VM s and enabling new ways of thinking about building and deploying software. We even built and open sourced an automation tool (ShutIt) to suit our organization’s delivery needs. Docker gave us a packaged and maintained tool that solved many problems that would have been effectively insuperable had we taken it upon ourselves to solve them. This was open source at its best, empowering us to take on a challenge using our spare time, overcoming technical debt, and learning lessons daily. Lessons not only about Docker, but about continuous integration, continuous delivery, packaging, automa- tion, and how people respond to speedy and disruptive technological change. 1 http://www.wired.com/2013/09/docker/ PREFACE xviii For us, Docker is a remarkably broad tool. Wherever you run software using Linux, Docker can impact it. This makes writing a book on the subject challenging, because the landscape is as broad as software itself. The task is made more onerous by the extraordinary rate at which the Docker ecosystem is producing solutions to meet the needs that emerge from such a fundamental change in software production. Over time, the shape of problems and solutions became familiar to us, and in this book we’ve endeavored to pass on this experience. This will enable you to figure out solu- tions to your particular technical and business constraints. When giving talks at meetups, we’re struck by how quickly Docker has become effective within organizations willing to embrace it. This book mirrors how we used Docker, going from our desktops, through the DevOps pipeline, and all the way to production. As a consequence, this book is sometimes unorthodox, but as engineers we believe that purity must sometimes give way to practicality, especially when it comes to saving money! Everything in this book is based on real lessons from the field, and we hope you benefit from our hard-won experience.