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

Security around Docker commands

We will shortly be exploring the build process and how we can harden this from a security perspective. In order to do this, however, we will first dig into some of the commands we will use in a little more detail so we know which ones are safe to use, and which pose a potential threat. Let's start by looking at the COPY and ADD commands.

COPY versus ADD – what's the story?

When you come to build an image, you will want to copy files from the host over to it. Typically, there are two methods for doing this. If you've done any research online, you may have seen comments along the lines of "don't use the ADD command." So why is this?

The ADD command allows us to recursively copy files over to the image, much like a cp -r command might do in Linux if we also piped it through zip when necessary. In short, it expands archive files and creates any directories that don't exist on the target.

The input to...