In this chapter, we discussed how IT is evolving from a monolithic design to microservices, and how containers are helping us achieve this type of architecture by allowing a modularized infrastructure. We used the example of an online store to demonstrate how microservices allow for the scalability of specific components without the need to bring down the entire application. Additionally, we explored how the same example has a highly available design by discussing how the microservices approach allows for just a portion of the application to fail without impacting the entire solution (that is, how only the reviews part failed without bringing down the entire online store).
Later, we learned how containers are created from images through the use of a Dockerfile, which uses a readable set of instructions to create the base image. An image can be seen as the counterpart of...