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

Chapter 14: Advanced Docker Security – Secrets, Secret Commands, Tagging, and Labels

We've seen several examples so far of the need to use files that contain secrets. We can think of secrets as a generic term for the types of sensitive data that would typically be stored in config and ENV files, such as database access credentials or API tokens. Docker provides a handy method for securing this type of data and sharing it. For legacy systems using swarm mode instead of Kubernetes, having an understanding of how to apply security to these environments is important, as you may have to retroactively fix environments in your career.

Along with managing secret data, we can also use labels and tags to help ensure we are working with security in mind. You've seen tags already in the previous chapter and we will explore these further later in this chapter.

Additionally, we will explore how metadata labels can be used to provide extra information about a container and...