30 posts tagged with "Docker"

Learning Docker is not about memorizing commands — it is about building a mental model of how containers work and developing the muscle memory to use them productively. This roadmap gives you a structured 4-month plan with weekly goals, hands-on exercises, self-assessments, and a clear progression from running your first container to operating production infrastructure. Every section references specific posts from this Docker series so you can dive deeper into each topic.

Docker questions show up in nearly every DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering interview. Interviewers are not looking for memorized definitions — they want to see that you understand how containers actually work, when to use specific features, and how to troubleshoot real production problems. This post covers 50 questions organized from beginner to advanced, each with a concise answer and the key commands you should know.

Running Docker on your laptop is simple. Running it across 500 developers, 2000 CI runners, and production clusters behind corporate firewalls is a different challenge entirely. Enterprise Docker means dealing with rate limits, network restrictions, compliance requirements, and operational concerns that never appear in tutorials. This post covers the infrastructure patterns that make Docker work at scale: registry mirrors that eliminate rate limits, build caches that cut CI time by 80%, air-gapped deployments for restricted environments, and governance policies that keep everything secure.

Docker Compose is excellent for running multi-container applications on a single machine. But when your application needs to run across multiple nodes, survive hardware failures, scale to thousands of replicas, or serve traffic globally, Compose cannot follow. Kubernetes was built for exactly these problems. This post maps every Compose concept to its Kubernetes equivalent, walks through both automated and manual migration, and shows the hybrid workflow most teams actually use in practice.

Most developers experience Docker as a production tool — build an image, push to a registry, deploy. But the development experience is equally important. Waiting 60 seconds for a rebuild every time you change a line of code is a productivity killer. This post covers the tools and patterns that make Docker development feel as fast as local development: volume mounts, compose watch, remote debugging, and Dev Containers that give every team member an identical environment in seconds.

Every megabyte in your Docker image is attack surface you do not need, bandwidth you pay for, and startup time your users wait through. A default Node.js image weighs over 1 GB. The same application built on a distroless base can drop to 120 MB. This post walks through every base image option, shows real size comparisons, and gives you language-specific recommendations for building the smallest, most secure images possible.