Docker Hands on: Deploy, Administer Docker Platform

by Navin Sabharwal, Bibin W

This book will help our readers to appreciate the docker technology and focusses on Hands on implementation of Docker Ecosystem.

We will introduce our readers to Containerization and docker technology, book covers the complete docker ecosystem and provides tutorials for installation, configuration, deployment, administration of the docker platform.

We cover the exhaustive docker ecosystem including packaging applications for docker, kubernetes, fleet, panamax, vagrant and other technologies in the docker ecosystem.

This book
- Introduces Docker to readers, the core concepts and technology behind Docker.
- Provides step by step guidelines to have your docker setup ready
- Provides hands on examples for installing and configuring Docker
- Provides insight into packaging applications using docker and deploying them.
- Detailed coverage of Mesosphere for Docker deployment and management
- Detailed coverage of Kubernetes clusters and Fleet.
- Hands on coverage of deployment tools including Fig, Shipyard and Panamax
- Step by Step guidelines to help you package your application on docker
- Introduction to Google Container Engine for Docker

300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 6, 2015

Reviews

[Jascha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unless one has been living in a secluded cave for quite some year, willing or not everyone has been exposed to the Docker phenomenon. Despite being a quite old technology, only recently Linux containers took the spotlight, and what was once just a feeble buzz has become a vigorous roar. Docker is quickly gaining the interest of both big companies and start-ups. This trend is obviously reflected by the huge amount of blog posts and discussions available over the Internet, as well as by the increased number of books that any enthusiast can find at his favorite bookstore. Among the titles available is Docker Hands on, a book that, despite the questionable job made by the proofreaders, if any, provides interesting material on advanced topics that can be rarely found anywhere else.

Let’s face it, containers are sexy! Despite being available for years, they were not widely used since they required great systems’ knowledge and a little bit of witchery to get them to work. Docker, taking care of all those scary internals, made it easy to deploy and thus exploit containers, transforming the way applications are deployed. Ah that blue whale!

The guys at Docker Inc. not only did a great job allowing us all, non kernel ninjas, to enjoy containers. They also did amazingly well documenting the product! On the contrary of many other open source projects (Nginx, Celery, …) indeed, Docker comes with an incredibly comprehensive documentation that clearly explain how to quickly deploy applications and how the magic happens. Having such a great (free) resource obviously makes it harder for anyone writing a book to add value and thus being worth a purchase or a download.

Docker Hands on can be broadly divided into two parts: the first introduces Docker and its architecture; the second presents real world use cases and covers advanced topics.

The first part of the book is poor. Plain and simple. Not only the pages are infested with plenty of grammatical and semantical errors, but Docker and its architecture are not clearly explained, despite the many schemas. Not enough emphasis is given to union mounts and what they have to do with containers. The way Docker allows host to containers and container to container flow of data is also poorly described.

The second part of the title is, instead, surprisingly good. Here the author covers topics that are very interesting to cloud architects and DevOps. Among them I have particularly enjoyed the chapters dedicated to provisioning, either through Vagrant or Chef (what about Puppet?), deployment (Fig and Shipyard) and cluster management (Mesos and Kubernetes). The examples given go way beyond the typical static website served through Apache and provide great value to the reader.

Overall, if one can survive the grammar horrors, it’s a very good read for anyone that already knows the basics. Beginners better look elsewhere, starting from the official homepage.

Suggested readings:

The Docker Book: an excellent introduction to Docker. Quickly gets anyone started deploying containers, it explains in a very friendly way the internals of the blue whale.

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!