Welcome to the container revolution. By reading this book, you’re opening your eyes to a new world of tools that are forever changing the way we build, deploy, and run software. Once I discovered Docker in 2014 (the year after it was open-sourced) I did something I had never done in my 20+ year career: I decided to focus exclusively on this single technology. That’s how much I believed in what Docker was doing to make our ever-increasing IT world easier to manage.

Fast forward to today, and what’s still unique about Docker’s way of creating and deploying containers is that it has both developers and operators in mind. You can see this in the user-experience of its command-line tools, and with hundreds of tools in the container ecosystem, I keep coming back to Docker as the easiest and smoothest way to get things done.

Jeff and Stephen know this too about Docker’s streamlined approach to containers, which is why this book focuses on the details of the core tools. Docker Engine, Docker Compose, and Docker Swarm are key tools we should all know. They often solve your problems without the need for more complex solutions. This same methodology is how I teach my students and how I guide my clients.

Containers couldn’t have come at a better time, taking features of the Linux kernel (and now Windows, ARM, and more) and automating them into accessible one-line commands. Sure, we had container-like features for years in Solaris, FreeBSD, and then Linux, but it was only the bravest sysadmins who got those features to work before Docker.

Containers today are now more than the sum of their parts. The workflow speed and agility that a fully Dockerized software lifecycle gives a team cannot be understated. I’m glad Jeff and Stephen took their battle-hardened experience and updated this already great book with new details and examples, and I’m confident you’ll gain benefits by putting their recommendations into practice.