Book Image

Docker for Developers

By : Richard Bullington-McGuire, Andrew K. Dennis, Michael Schwartz
2 (1)
Book Image

Docker for Developers

2 (1)
By: Richard Bullington-McGuire, Andrew K. Dennis, Michael Schwartz

Overview of this book

Docker is the de facto standard for containerizing apps, and with an increasing number of software projects migrating to containers, it is crucial for engineers and DevOps teams to understand how to build, deploy, and secure Docker environments effectively. Docker for Developers will help you understand Docker containers from scratch while taking you through best practices and showing you how to address security concerns. Starting with an introduction to Docker, you’ll learn how to use containers and VirtualBox for development. You’ll explore how containers work and develop projects within them after you’ve explored different ways to deploy and run containers. The book will also show you how to use Docker containers in production in both single-host set-ups and in clusters and deploy them using Jenkins, Kubernetes, and Spinnaker. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with monitoring, securing, and scaling Docker using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana. Later, you’ll be able to deploy Docker containers to a variety of environments, including the cloud-native Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), before finally delving into Docker security concepts and best practices. By the end of the Docker book, you’ll be able to not only work in a container-driven environment confidently but also use Docker for both new and existing projects.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: An Introduction to Docker – Containers and Local Development
6
Section 2: Running Docker in Production
14
Section 3: Docker Security – Securing Your Containers

An overview of best practices

In the following chapters, we will be delving into techniques to ensure your containers are secure. You'll be happy to know that there are a number of best practices that you can use off the bat to ensure that you are thinking about and implementing security at the most basic level.

The first thing to understand, and that you may have already picked up on, is that Docker containers, compared to VMs, do not provide the same level of security. We gave an example earlier of how a VM can be used for malware analysis due to its sandboxed environment. Therefore, from a security perspective, you should approach containers as a mechanism that is used to optimally package system resources and applications for development and delivery (with some very useful security built in) but not treat them as a micro-VM.

With this in mind, let's look at some best practices we can apply when using Docker.

Keeping Docker patched

As with any application you...