Introduction
Course Objective
Hello! And welcome to the Complete Intro to Containers! The objective of this course is demystify what containers are, describe how they can be useful to you, and walk you through the steps of working with containers so that at the end of this course containers will be another tool available to you in your toolbox. Containers are just getting more important in the industry and now it's not just a tool for ops, it's a tool for developers. Everyone from the designers to the low level system engineers will need to interact with containers on a regular basis. This will help you get ahead of the curve.
Who Are You?
This course is aimed at a developer demographic. While all the examples will be dealing with JavaScript applications, you don't necessarily need to be a JavaScript developer to grasp this case; the code will be incidental to the concepts being taught.
This course assumes a very basic grasp of Linux and using the command line. You don't need to be a bash expert but this shouldn't be your first exposure to Linux or the command line. The class will be taught for both macOS and Windows users and will be using Ubuntu and Alpine Linux for the containers. This will also work well for Linux developers but the class won't have any additional instructions for Linux devs but following the macOS steps should be 95% the same. If you are a Windows developer, please be using Windows 10. You'll need to either use WSL 2 or VirtualBox. See the set up instructions below.
For set up instructions, refer here.
To see all of the completed project files in a repo, refer here.
Do note that containers can take a lot of CPU and memory. If you have a modern-ish processor and 8GB, you will be fine. This could probably be done with some slow down on 4GB but anything lower would be pretty tough.
This can also take a lot of bandwidth because we'll be downloading a lot of things. Be aware of that.
Where to File Issues
I write these courses and take care to not make mistakes. However when teaching hours of material, mistakes are inevitable, both here in the grammar and in the course with the material. However I (and the wonderful team at Frontend Masters) are constantly correcting the mistakes so that those of you that come later get the best product possible. If you find a mistake we'd love to fix it. The best way to do this is to open a pull request or file an issue on the GitHub repo. While I'm always happy to chat and give advice on social media, I can't be tech support for everyone. And if you file it on GitHub, those who come later can Google the same answer you got.
Who Am I?
My name is Brian Holt. I'm presently (as of writing) a senior program manager over Visual Studio Code and JavaScript on Azure at Microsoft. That means I'm trying to make Azure a place you want to deploy your code and VSCode the best tool to write code with. I've taught a lot of lessons on Frontend Masters and used to be on the frontend development podcast Front End Happy Hour. Previous to that, I was a cloud advocate for Microsoft and a staff JavaScript / Node.js engineer at LinkedIn, Netflix, Reddit, Needle, KSL.com, and NuSkin. I'm also stoke to be a board member of the amazing organization Vets Who Code.
My biggest passions in life are people and experiences. I hope by going through this course that it can improve your life in some meaningful way and that you in turn can improve someone else's life. My beautiful wife and I live in Seattle, Washington in the United States of America with our cute little Havanese dog Luna. I'd almost always rather be traveling and have been fortunate to see over forty countries in the past six years.
Please catch up with me on social media, would love to chat:
Why was this course created?
I love to teach. It's a challenging task that forces you to peel back all the knowledge you've gained so you can approach someone who lacks the same experience and terminology you have. It forces you to take amorphous concepts floating in your brain and crystalize them into solid concepts that you can describe. It forces you to acknowledge your gaps in knowledge because you'll begin to question things you know others will question. For me to ever master a concept, I have to teach it to someone else.
Unfortunately life gets in the way. These courses take dozens of hours to prepare and to get right. While I'd love to just create content all day, I have a (awesome) day job at Microsoft that demands and deserves my full attention. However I'm grateful to the team at Frontend Masters for giving me deadlines and incentive to create these courses and then allowing and encouraging me to open source the materials. Not everyone has the money to pay for these courses which is why these materials are and will be forever open source for you to reference and share. I think the video content is pretty good too and so I'd encourage you to take a look at the videos on Frontend Masters too if that's in the cards for you.
And hey, if you could take a second and star the repo on GitHub I'd be super appreciative. It helps me reach more people.