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Introduction

Course Overview​

Course tutors​

  • Paris Cristian-Tănase (Cristi)
  • Popescu Adrian (Adi)
  • Cosma George (George)

Course structure​

  1. Day 1 (Mon) - Why containers? Containers vs virtual machines, local setup, running your first containers
  2. Day 2 (Tue) - The container lifecycle, building your own images with a Dockerfile
  3. Day 3 (Wed) - Container networking, persisting data with volumes, multi-container apps with Docker Compose
  4. Day 4 (Fri) - Shipping your app: registries, configuration and secrets, real-world deployments, and orchestration with Docker Swarm
  5. Day 5 (Sat) - A concept tour of Kubernetes, and the kickoff of your final project
  6. Project days (Mon–Tue) - You and your team build and ship your own containerized app, presented at the Projects Display

Alongside the course slots there are workshop slots (Wednesday and Saturday evening) where you solve the hands-on exercises with us in the room. During the mini-workshop slots (Intro to Git, GitHub) you can choose: attend those, or catch up on the course exercises - both are good choices, and Git/GitHub skills will directly help you on the final project.

What is this course about?​

The goal of this course is to teach you about containers: how to build them, how to connect them, and how to ship an application into the world with them. By the end of the course, you will take an application from "it works on my machine" to a reproducible, multi-container setup that you can deploy, scale and update - and you will understand what tools like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes do, and why the industry uses them.

In brief, containerization is packaging an application and its dependencies into a standardized unit, known as a container. This container can then be easily moved between environments, ensuring consistency and reliability across different systems.

We care about containerization because it allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications more efficiently. By isolating applications within containers, we can avoid conflicts between dependencies and ensure that the application runs consistently regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

Orchestration is managing and coordinating multiple containers, possibly across multiple machines. This includes tasks such as scaling containers up or down, load balancing traffic between containers, and ensuring high availability of the application. In this course you will get hands-on experience with Docker's built-in orchestrator, Swarm, and a guided tour of Kubernetes, the industry-standard orchestration platform.

By the end of this course, you will have the skills and knowledge needed to containerize an application and run it anywhere - your laptop, a friend's laptop, or a server in the cloud.

Setup instructions for required tools​

You need the following to take part in the course:

  1. Docker - on Windows and macOS install Docker Desktop; on Linux install Docker Engine. Docker Compose is included in both.

  2. WSL2 (Windows only) - Docker Desktop needs it. Follow the install instructions.

  3. A code editor - VS Code recommended.

  4. A free Docker Hub account - we will use it to publish images. Verify your email address, and run docker login once Docker is installed.

  5. A GitHub account - needed for the final project (and for the Git and GitHub mini-workshops).

  6. Pre-pull the course images - once Docker works, download the images we will use during the week, so a slow camp connection doesn't hold you back mid-exercise:

    docker pull ubuntu:24.04
    docker pull alpine
    docker pull nginx:1.27
    docker pull nginx:1.29
    docker pull node:22-alpine
    docker pull mariadb:11
    docker pull python:3.13-alpine
    note

    Docker Hub is not the only registry in town. If it is slow or complains about rate limits (toomanyrequests), the same official images are mirrored on other public registries - pull from there and retag:

    # AWS public mirror of the Docker official images:
    docker pull public.ecr.aws/docker/library/ubuntu:24.04
    docker tag public.ecr.aws/docker/library/ubuntu:24.04 ubuntu:24.04

    # Google's mirror of popular images:
    docker pull mirror.gcr.io/library/ubuntu:24.04
    docker tag mirror.gcr.io/library/ubuntu:24.04 ubuntu:24.04

    After the docker tag, the image behaves exactly as if it came from Docker Hub - more on why in the Registries chapter.

tip

Install everything on day one - setup problems are normal (especially WSL2 and BIOS virtualization settings on Windows) and we have dedicated time on Monday to fix them together. Don't struggle alone: ask!