JDays Day 0 - Docker Workshop

JDays

I've had the opportunity to attend JDays 2015. Both the regular conference but also one of the workshops that was held in conjunction with the conference. To help me remember what I've learned and what cool new suff I came in contact with at the conference, I've decided to write a short blog entry about the talks I attended each day. Let's start with day 0...

JDays Day 0 - Docker Workshop

As a prequel to the regular JDays conference I attended a one day workshop on Docker. It was held by Fredric Wendt from Growing Agility and Marcus Lönnberg from SpeedLedger. The aim of the workshop was to learn the basics of what Docker is, how it can be used to to deploy various servers/services and to practice doing just that.

The teacher had prepared a Vagrant box that we, the pupils, were required to download the day before the workshop started. On the Vagrant box, Docker and some other useful software were installed. This was a really good thing as it enabled us to start working on Docker-related things directly from the start of the workshop without wasting unecessary time on downloading and installing stuff. Another upside was that the common Vagrant box made the environments of all the attendantees equal, which made debugging of the exercises easier (equal environments for many is by the way on of the main benefits of Docker).

The actual workshop as split into lecturing sessions and practical exercises. Each (lecturing session, exercise) pair started with the teachers giving a short introduction to a specific Docker-related topic for about five to ten minutes. Then the attendees got the chance to try out the things descripted in a practical exercise, which most of the time took about twenty to thirty minutes. The teachers were available for helping out with problems or questions all of the time.

This way of working worked out very well I think. Me and my fellow workshoppers were on approximately the same level and held more or less the same pace when working with the exercises, which minimized the waiting times (which I, as the impatient person I am, appreciates ;)

The following topics were covered:

• Introcudion to Docker
• Images
• Containers
• Dockerfiles
• Tagging
• The registry
• Volumes
• Linking
• Datacontainers
• Docker compose

I think that that the pick of topics and the order they were presented was an obvious and good one. I did not feel as I missed something from the topic list.

My overall impression of the workshop is that it was really good. The course materials was fairly good, altough it contained some bugs and/or unclear stuff. The range of topics covered was excellent and I feel that I after the workshop have a quite good overall knowledge of what Docker is and how it can be used to create various execution environments.

I'm planning to play around a bit with Docker as I think it is a really nice and interesting piece of technology. One idea I have is to create one Docker container containing a MongoDB server and connect it to another Docker container having this blog running in either the Django development server (as a start) or Nginx (later on). This was I can play around with different versions of MongoDB and different webservers without having to be afraid of breaking something. This sounds really interesting and I hope I get around to doing it.

Links to Docker related sites