Azure Dev College - Containers

I am fortunate enough to be part of a two day Azure Dev College hosted by Microsoft. We were given the prerequisites before hand and we needed the following tools.

choco install azure-cli

choco install kubernetes-cli | az aks install-cli

choco install kubernetes-helm
choco install terraform
choco install docker-desktop | choco install docker-cli

I am excited to see what we are going to learn. The course is given a no-show fee, so if you do not attend your company will get a fee.

The two day workshop consists of the first day learning about the docker infrastructure and on the second day we will have look at Kubernetes.

After a short introduction Özgür Öztürk starts on with a presentation about the origins of docker and where the idea originated from. Soon we get the first commands to work with docker.

We basically did these challenges on day 1, with an introduction by Ozzy to each section in a few slides.
Challenge 1 is giving all the different basic docker commands when want to run an app with the docker container runtime on your machine.

Challenge 2 shows us how to check container logs, list processes, check containers resource usages. My biggest takeaway the possibilities to inspect and explore the container.

docker logs contaer_id/container_name 
--details
--follow
--since string
--tail string
--timestamps
--until string

docker top container_id/container_name

I can really recommend reading documentation, since I could have known this earlier. We are also introduced in setting Environmental Variables.

Challenge 3 is showing us ways to create and manage Volumes and explains the different network types we can use in the docker environment.

In Challenge 4 we learn how to use image registries and how to properly tag our images. The :latest is default, but there are no convention on how to tag your repositories. There are various approaches and these have to be discussed in the team.
Simple Dockerfile samples are given to setup java, nodejs and php. docker commit was new to me, with images like scratch there are probably some use cases.

Since we are working with Microsoft Challenge 5 shows us how to deploy the apps, we created before, in Azure. We created a Azure Container Registry, it allows us to build, store and manage container images in a private registry. I am also starting my first Kubernetes Cluster on Azure! With the help of Azure Kubernetes Service we also deployed the php app in our Kubernetes Cluster hosted on Azure. It is a little prelude to day 2.

Challenge 6 consists of a lot of further reading.

Day 1 was really good and it is nice to get a glance at Microsoft.
Microsoft is putting great effort in contributing to CNCF, and has also greatly improved the windows container Eco system in a short period of time.
Azure seems, at least to me, to be the 'go to' cloud for enterprise solutions, as it always has been with Microsoft Products.

Really interesting where this container world is going!
Thanks for reading, stay healthy.