Setup

Before we get started, make sure your system has the latest version of Docker installed.

Install Docker

Note: version 1.13 or higher is required

You should be able to run docker run hello-world and see a response like this:

Note: You may need to add your user to the docker group in order to call this command without sudo. Read more

Note: If there are networking issues in your setup, docker run hello-world may fail to execute successfully. In case you are behind a proxy server and you suspect that it blocks the connection, check the next part of the tutorial.

$ docker run hello-world

Hello from Docker!

This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

To generate this message, Docker took the following steps:

...(snipped)...

Now would also be a good time to make sure you are using version 1.13 or higher. Run docker --version to check it out.

$ docker --version

Docker version 17.05.0-ce-rc1, build 2878a85

If you see messages like the ones above, you are ready to begin your journey.

Conclusion

The unit of scale being an individual, portable executable has vast implications. It means CI/CD can push updates to any part of a distributed application, system dependencies are not an issue, and resource density is increased. Orchestration of scaling behavior is a matter of spinning up new executables, not new VM hosts.

We’ll be learning about all of these things, but first let’s learn to walk.