"Back to Basics" session for people new to Docker

[hairyhenderson]

We've had a few requests for something that can help explain Docker at a practical level to people who are brand-new to it.

Some ideas around this:

• how is Docker different from virtualization?
• how do I install Docker for development? for production?
• discussion around Docker images & containers (layers etc), and Docker Registries
• reference to Docker Compose and Swarm Mode for orchestration and scheduling (but probably out of scope)

[patrickceg]

Regarding the question of how Docker is different from virtualization, is the interest mainly for the people saying "I have VMs - why should I use Docker"?

I'm thinking a few lightning-talks on use cases or early "transitions" to Docker would be useful here.

I could share my insight on that coming from someone who "only" has 3-6 machines in the dev cluster at any given time. (Yeah, I know - unlike the hype, there still exist those that don't have so many machines they buy their provider a new car every month.) I started out by selecting one thing to try to Dockerize - which for me was a Jenkins slave. I slowly grew that to the point where everything on the cluster except for our file share is Dockerized. That said, I don't immediately reach for Docker every time - it's a great tool, but it's not the only one.

As for Registries and Swarm, I think someone who uses Docker for would be better qualified than me :)

[hairyhenderson]

Regarding the question of how Docker is different from virtualization, is the interest mainly for the people saying "I have VMs - why should I use Docker"?

Yeah, that's the impression I'm getting.

I could share my insight...

Fantastic! Sounds like you'd be interested in doing a "use-case" type lightning talk? Any particular month you'd be willing to deliver that? Probably a 10min type talk would be great. Let's connect on YOWDev Slack to firm up details 🙂

[patrickceg]

Well I temporarily overcame what makes me go off on multi-hour tangents after being distracted by a popup on my computer to write a presentation outline...

1. My Docker Use Case

• Why I use Docker at work

2. Why should you use Docker
   2.1 Why should you use Docker ... when you already use VMs?
   2.2 Very brief overview of Docker virtualization versus a VM
3. How to start using Docker

• Finding something to Dockerize

4. Demo: Running containers

• Hello World container to describe what Docker does in the background when you call "docker run"
• SQL database container to show some quirks in networking that tripped me up when I started connecting something not in Docker to something that is in Docker
• Something else where two containers talk to each other (not sure what it should be, but hopefully something that doesn't require me to make my own Compose file as I just made my first Docker Compose file yesterday)

5. Conclusion / Next Steps

• Refer to those online training "labs" that I currently forgot the title of

How's this? Any tips?

[hairyhenderson]

This looks great @patrickceg!

If you're looking for some sample material for the presentation, have a look at https://github.com/docker/labs - there are some demos in there, though you may need to do some trimming to make some of them simpler 🙂

Otherwise, this looks great! Would you be able to present this for our August 30th meetup? If so - let me know and we'll work out details in Slack

[patrickceg]

(reason for late reply below)
Sure, I'll see what I can do to get the presentation ready for August 30th. Fair warning: I left my MS Office license expired, so making the slides will be an experiment in trying alternatives to hated but familiar PowerPoint . ...thinking about it more, I haven't made a slides presentation for a whole year because I've presented exclusively with demos and results raw out of our apps...

(I had a brain-frying week so didn't want to see anything that looked like a text editor after getting home... One of those week-long sessions to find 5 lines of code in the wrong place.)