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Mumshad Mannambeth

Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud.

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Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud.

This course introduces Docker to an Absolute Beginner using really simple and easy-to-understand lectures. Lectures are followed by demos showing how to set up and get started with Docker. The coding exercises that accompany this course will help you practice Docker commands, develop your own images using Dockerfiles, and practice Docker Compose. You will be developing Docker files for different use cases right in your browser. This way, you don’t really need to have your own environment set up to get some hands-on practice. The coding exercises will validate your commands and Dockerfiles and ensure you have written them correctly.

And finally, we have assignments to put your skills to the test. You will be given the challenge to solve using the skills you gained during this course. This is a great way to gain real-life project experience and work with the other students in the community to develop a Dockerfile and get feedback for your work. The assignment will push you to research and develop your own Docker images.

Docker Course Requirements

1. Basic System Administrator Skills

2. Good to have (Not Mandatory) access to a Linux System to setup Docker to follow along

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What's inside

Syllabus

Docker Introduction
The "Docker Introduction" module provides beginners with an entry point into the world of Docker. Participants will gain an understanding of Docker's fundamentals and its relevance in contemporary software development. This module offers an overview of Docker, explaining its purpose and basic functionalities. Additionally, participants will be guided through a demonstration to install and set up Docker on their systems, laying the groundwork for further exploration of Docker's capabilities.
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Traffic lights

Read about what's good
what should give you pause
and possible dealbreakers
Constructs a beginner-friendly intro to Docker for learners with no prior experience
Balances foundational theory with regular check-ins where learning is applied
Incudes hands-on coding exercises to enhance students' practical skills
Assignments allow learners to practice skills and receive feedback from instructors
Uses simplified and easy-to-understand lectures for effective knowledge transfer
Mandates that learners have basic system administrator skills

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Reviews summary

Docker basics for devops: foundational hands-on learning

According to learners, this course is a highly effective and practical introduction to Docker for absolute beginners, particularly those in or aspiring to DevOps roles. Students consistently praise the clear, concise lectures and the emphasis on extensive hands-on labs and coding exercises, which are deemed crucial for solidifying understanding. The in-browser environment eliminates setup complexities, making it easy to dive in. While some note it's a basic overview, it's widely considered to provide a strong foundation for real-world application and further learning. The course appears to be well-maintained and up-to-date.
Covers basics well but requires further advanced study.
"This course provides a solid introduction, but it's important to remember it's 'basics.' Don't expect deep dives into advanced topics."
"I feel this course is a strong starting point for Docker. For more advanced use cases, I'll definitely need to explore other resources."
"It gives you a good grasp of the fundamentals. To truly master Docker for complex scenarios, more specialized learning will be necessary."
Convenient labs eliminate local environment setup issues.
"The in-browser labs are a lifesaver! I didn't have to worry about setting up my environment, which saved a lot of time and frustration."
"I really appreciated not needing my own environment. The labs worked seamlessly, allowing me to focus on learning Docker itself."
"It's great that all labs are directly in the browser. It makes practicing very accessible and straightforward."
Course materials reflect current Docker practices.
"I found the content to be very current with recent Docker versions and best practices. No outdated information."
"It seems the course is regularly updated, which is crucial for a rapidly evolving technology like Docker."
"The information presented feels fresh and relevant, which is a huge plus compared to some older Docker courses out there."
Prepares learners for real-world DevOps scenarios.
"This course directly applies to what I need for my DevOps role. The practical examples are highly relevant."
"I found the course extremely useful for understanding how Docker fits into a modern development and deployment pipeline."
"It gave me a solid understanding of Docker that I can immediately apply in my work. Very practical and focused."
Instructor provides easy-to-understand lectures and demos.
"The instructor explains complex topics in a very simple and easy-to-understand manner. The demos are also very helpful."
"I found the lectures to be very clear and well-structured, making it easy to follow along even with no prior Docker knowledge."
"The content delivery is precise, and the instructor breaks down intimidating topics into digestible chunks. Really appreciate the clarity."
Provides crucial practical experience with Docker commands.
"The hands-on labs and coding exercises are the strongest part of this course. They really help in understanding and retaining the concepts."
"I loved the interactive labs; it's one thing to watch a demo and another to actually type commands and see the output."
"The practical exercises and assignments are fantastic. I feel much more confident using Docker after all the hands-on practice."
Perfect for those new to Docker and containerization.
"This course is excellent for absolute beginners. The concepts are explained very clearly, and the labs are a great way to practice."
"As someone completely new to Docker, I found this course incredibly helpful. It starts from the very basics and builds up logically."
"I was an absolute beginner in Docker, and this course made it incredibly easy to grasp the core concepts."

Activities

Be better prepared before your course. Deepen your understanding during and after it. Supplement your coursework and achieve mastery of the topics covered in Docker Basics for DevOps with these activities:
Read _Docker Deep Dive_ by Nigel Poulton
Become familiar with Docker Engine and its capabilities.
View Docker Deep Dive on Amazon
Show steps
  • Purchase and begin reading Docker Deep Dive.
  • Review chapters 1-3 to familiarize yourself with Docker
  • Complete end of chapter exercises for chapters 1-3
Follow Docker tutorials on Docker Hub
Expand your knowledge of Docker by following guided tutorials.
Browse courses on Docker Hub
Show steps
  • Visit Docker Hub at https://hub.docker.com/
  • Search for tutorials that align with your interests or learning objectives
  • Follow the steps in the tutorial to complete the exercises
Practice writing Dockerfiles
Reinforce knowledge of Docker commands and syntax.
Browse courses on Dockerfiles
Show steps
  • Access the Dockerfile Tutorial at https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/
  • Review example Dockerfiles and their corresponding documentation
  • Create a Dockerfile for a simple web application using the steps outlined in the documentation
  • Test your Dockerfile by building and running the image
One other activity
Expand to see all activities and additional details
Show all four activities
Build a Docker image for a personal project
Apply your Docker skills to a practical application.
Browse courses on Docker Image
Show steps
  • Identify a personal project that would benefit from containerization
  • Create a Dockerfile for your project
  • Build and test your Docker image
  • Deploy your Docker image to a container registry
  • Optionally, share your Docker image with the community on Docker Hub

Career center

Learners who complete Docker Basics for DevOps will develop knowledge and skills that may be useful to these careers:

Reading list

We've selected 50 books that we think will supplement your learning. Use these to develop background knowledge, enrich your coursework, and gain a deeper understanding of the topics covered in Docker Basics for DevOps.
If you read a book about DevOps, read this one. It combines research and case studies to provide a compelling argument that DevOps is essential for the success of technology organizations.
Authored by Kubernetes co-founders, this canonical text delivers the definitive mental model for container orchestration, pod scheduling, services, and declarative deployment lifecycles.
Widely regarded as the foundational text of the discipline, Newman's comprehensive guide examines service boundary modeling, asynchronous communication, distributed workflow coordination, and organizational alignment. Balanced trade-off analysis helps architects decide when and how to adopt fine-grained services.
Continuously updated for the modern Compose Specification (Compose V2), Nigel Poulton's industry-standard handbook walks developers through multi-container compose.yaml files, bridge networks, named volumes, healthchecks, and Compose Watch live-sync workflows.
Structured as a rigorous pattern language, this architectural handbook solves the hardest distributed data management challenges including sagas, transactional outbox, CQRS, and event sourcing. Concrete Java and Spring examples demonstrate how to maintain data consistency across isolated service databases.
Kane and Matthias's third edition details how Docker Compose orchestrates local microservice topologies, BuildKit multi-stage builds, environment variable interpolation, and seamless transitions from local Compose stacks to cloud container runtimes.
Demystifies container execution mechanics from packaging through distribution, providing concrete recipes for bind mounts, network bridging, and runtime isolation barriers.
This classic book popularized the concept of CI/CD and provides a comprehensive overview of the practice. It covers everything from building and testing to deployment and monitoring, and it includes case studies from real-world companies.
From the DevOps pioneers must-read for anyone who wants to understand the benefits of DevOps and how to implement it in their organization.
Systematizes reusable cloud-native design patterns, analyzing sidecar injection, adapter containers, leader election, and distributed configuration across production clusters.
Addresses high-stakes enterprise operational challenges, detailing multi-cluster networking, ingress controller architecture, cluster autoscaling, and disaster recovery strategies.
Gathers 100+ proven patterns and diagnostic workflows, tackling real-world problems around automated container builds, minimal base images, build caching, and volume persistence.
Dedicated multi-chapter labs teach practitioners how to model distributed web applications, reverse proxies, databases, and Prometheus/Grafana monitoring stacks using declarative Docker Compose overrides across dev, test, and staging environments.
Migrating legacy brownfield systems without halting feature delivery requires incremental decomposition patterns such as the Strangler Fig, branch by abstraction, and parallel run. Newman focuses specifically on untangling shared relational schemas and managing transitional state safely.
Explains core cluster architecture with remarkable pedagogical clarity, demystifying etcd consensus, API server mechanics, and runtime security for systems engineers.
Bridges the gap between cloud-native practices and DevOps methodologies using Kubernetes. It's an essential guide for developers and DevOps engineers looking to build and scale modern applications in the cloud, covering topics like IaC, CI/CD, monitoring, and security.
Decoupling services through immutable event streams eliminates brittle synchronous request chains and enables scalable real-time data topologies. Bellemare covers event schemas, stateful stream processing, materialized views, and organizational governance at enterprise scale.
Nickoloff and Kuenzli explain the underlying Linux namespace, cgroup resource limits, virtual Ethernet bridge routing, and read-write volume mounts that every service declaration inside a Docker Compose file configures under the hood.
A comprehensive guide to Kubernetes, taking a hands-on approach from basic concepts to advanced deployment strategies. It includes practical examples and real-world use cases, making it valuable for gaining a deep understanding of Kubernetes.
Guides systems developers through extending the Kubernetes control plane, focusing on client-go libraries, custom resource definitions (CRDs), and controller reconciliation loops.
Presents high-availability architectural blueprints for distributed cloud systems, covering container clustering, horizontal autoscaling, load shedding, and resilience engineering.
This handbook provides a step-by-step guide to implementing DevOps in your organization. It covers all aspects of DevOps, from planning to implementation to measurement, and it valuable resource for anyone looking to get started with DevOps.
Hands-on engineering chapters walk through building, securing, and deploying reactive Java microservices using Spring Boot 3, Docker, Kubernetes, and Istio service mesh. Developers gain practical mastery of OAuth 2.0 security, Resilience4j circuit breakers, and OpenTelemetry tracing.
Provides a comprehensive overview of the Linux kernel architecture and internals, including detailed coverage of kernel data structures and algorithms.
Fourth-edition coverage dives deep into advanced Docker Compose patterns: extending base compose configurations, injecting Docker secrets, tuning logging drivers, and running automated integration test suites inside isolated Compose networks.
This comprehensive guide covers all aspects of the Linux command line, from basic commands to advanced scripting techniques.
Provides a strong mental model for understanding cloud-native applications and the patterns that distinguish them. It's particularly useful for gaining a broad understanding of the architectural principles behind cloud-native development. It serves as a valuable reference for anyone designing or building cloud-native systems.
Provides a comprehensive overview of CI/CD and DevOps. It covers everything from the basics of CI/CD to the cultural and organizational changes that are necessary to adopt DevOps.
Investigates defense-in-depth container security, detailing host kernel hardening, secure image supply chains, automated SBOM auditing, and runtime workload protection mechanisms.
Focuses on modern Docker Compose workflows, multi-service local stacks, environment-variable templating, and production-ready container networking for full-stack development teams.
Furnishes pragmatic configuration recipes for systems administrators, tackling multi-container Compose orchestration, private registry management, and host storage performance.
Tackles operational infrastructure for training and serving machine learning workloads, exploring GPU scheduling, orchestrator optimization, and distributed tensor pipelines.
Eliminating 'works on my machine' drift requires standardizing local polyglot developer environments with Docker Compose, hot-reloading bind mounts, and CI test runners that spin up ephemeral database and cache dependencies.
Demystifies the Operator SDK framework, teaching site reliability engineers how to encapsulate human operational knowledge into automated, self-healing Go controllers.
Explores enterprise container operations at scale, walking through security vulnerability scanning, multi-node clustering, secrets rotation, and automated infrastructure monitoring.
This handbook focuses specifically on the architectural aspects of cloud-native systems, including design principles and patterns. It's a good resource for architects and senior developers looking to deepen their understanding of designing enterprise-grade cloud-native applications.
Addressing the operational complexities of asynchronous architectures, this guide details idempotency, out-of-order message handling, dead-letter queues, and eventual consistency monitoring. Pragmatic advice bridges high-level architecture diagrams with day-two production realities.
Details modern GitOps deployment pipelines, examining declarative configuration management, continuous cluster state synchronization, and automated blue-green rollouts.
Building a multi-service video-streaming platform from scratch, Davis uses Docker Compose as the rapid local iteration engine for Node.js, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB microservices before promoting images to cloud clusters.
For developers working with Spring Boot, this book provides guidance on building scalable, resilient, and observable applications for cloud environments using Spring and Kubernetes. It covers cloud-native patterns and best practices within the Spring ecosystem.
Addresses cluster-wide container orchestration and automated rollouts, detailing Swarm scheduling algorithms, service discovery, overlay networks, and declarative stack manifests.
Unpacks the transition from standalone Docker engines to Kubernetes orchestration, exploring pod abstractions, deployment manifests, service mesh concepts, and resource governance.
Focuses on cryptographic key protection and sensitive configuration management, detailing Vault integrations, external secrets operators, and envelope encryption workflows.
Walks step-by-step through multi-container orchestration with Docker Compose, covering health checks, named volumes, custom bridge networks, and zero-downtime deployment patterns.
Starting from a minimal single-service application, readers progressively evolve a clean architecture into a multi-service system with service discovery, API routing, and message brokers. Pedagogical clarity makes it an ideal entry point for backend developers new to distributed systems.
Distilling lessons from Uber's hyper-growth infrastructure, Fowler defines an operational readiness checklist covering stability, deployment pipelines, monitoring, alerting, and catastrophe preparedness. Engineering leaders use this concise framework to audit microservice maturity.
Examines cloud-native patterns for containerized applications, illustrating twelve-factor design principles, health check probes, stateless service tiers, and persistent state stores.
Provides a comprehensive guide to deployment automation, a key part of the DevOps process. It covers the tools, techniques, and best practices for automating deployments, and it valuable resource for anyone looking to improve their deployment process.

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