20  What next?

Although we’re done with our Docker get started guide, there’s still a lot more to learn about containers. If you want to learn more, take a look at the video workshop from DockerCon 2022. Watch the video below or use the links to open the video at a particular section.

• Docker overview and installation
• Pull, run, and explore containers
• Build a container image
• Containerize an app
• Connect a DB and set up a bind mount
• Deploy a container to the cloud

20.1 Container orchestration with Kubernetes

Running containers in production is tough. You don’t want to log into a machine and simply run a docker run or docker-compose up. Why not? Well, what happens if the containers die? How do you scale across several machines? Container orchestration solves this problem. Tools like Kubernetes help solve this problem.

The general idea is that you have “managers” who receive expected state. This state might be “I want to run two instances of my web app and expose port 80.” The managers then look at all of the machines in the cluster and delegate work to “worker” nodes. The managers watch for changes (such as a container quitting) and then work to make actual state reflect the expected state.

We will cover Kubernetes in the next chapter.