It has been argued that the recent advent of Docker technology will completely revolutionize current software engineering approaches. It works on the principles of containers where software can be installed with complete file dependencies and execution tools so that it runs on any server, very similar to the concept of virtual machines, which hold all the necessary packages needed. Kubernetes is a Google venture, released as open source, which enables users to create Docker swarms, easily deploy them, and operate on these across multiple machines. Whether you are a software engineer, part of a devops team, or just interested in how computing approaches are changing, both of these technologies are something you would definitely be interested in.
Saying this, I was quite interested in finding out more about these tools, which led me to this book. I have found a number of tutorials online and a very good YouTube video hosted at the Docker website that talk one through installation and running instructions. But I was struggling to understand how I would eventually use them. The book is very similar to all of these tutorials online. Through a series of screenshots, it compiles instructions on how Docker and Kubernetes can be installed with various tools such as SQL databases, Hadoop clusters, Kafka clusters, and multinode clusters. Although the book is very good for a beginner who is trying to install and make these things run on their systems, it fails to go further to discuss how these techniques might be used.
Before we go further, let’s look at the differences between a virtual machine (VM) and Docker. There is a very good image (see https://www.docker.com/what-docker) that shows the difference between a complete VM and a Docker container. VMs contain a copy of the operating system, libraries, and applications. Containers can share their operating system using the Docker engine and only contain the libraries and the applications. The book fails to mention this distinction, which is why containers are gaining so much popularity.
The book also does not describe current uses of the technology, how it may be extended, or even case study examples using Docker to host certain services that could not be done with traditional cloud service approaches. It is an alternative to using virtual machine clusters or hiring the resources of cloud environments.
Despite of the lack of inspiration, I would say that I find myself referring to the book about 100 times a day, while installing Docker and Kubernetes, just to get everything started and configured properly before I start deploying services. However, it would be left to the imagination to see what to do next with these techniques and how they fare with current virtual machine/cloud deployments. I would thus recommend the book to those starting off with Docker, with the caveat that they would eventually need to see a number of Docker project examples to determine how they can extend the technology for their projects.
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