On April 19 & 20, we (ad)ventured into the cloud & container lands. First, on Friday evening jackie gave hir talk titled Shine some light through this cloud. A short primer on clouds and cloud computing (the link leads to the slide deck), and in the following discussion we already talked a lot about the difference of full virtualisation and containerisation.

Then on Saturday afternoon we gathered again to go through a Docker Intro Workshop (link again leads to the slide deck of the workshop). In it we started by looking in to the basics of containerisation and how it works specifically with Docker.

First we established how to run simple commands, either on participants local machine, or on the awesome Docker Playground, which gives you a browser-based frontend to quickly create some nodes and deploy containers there (which is especially nice if you want to quickly try out something but don’t have a running Docker on your local machine).

Besides the official docs on https://docs.docker.com we also used the The Ultimate Docker Cheat Sheet, the Hello World in Docker and Container Manipulation Basics chapters in Farhan Hasin Chowdhury’s open source Docker Handbook (which also has a staging version rendered with GitBook, containing a more user-friendly table of contents on the side). We then ventured to the Play with Docker classrooms, and went through the Docker for Beginners – Linux lab. Finally, jackie gave some insights into how docker compose and the docker-compose.yaml file can be used to quickly spin up a whole set of containers.

While it would have been super interesting to continue with looking into all the other moving parts in the Docker environment (e.g. images, networks, volumes), the 4 hours were just the amount we could reasonably take in on a Saturday afternoon. It also turned out that the discussion about containerisation on the evening before helped a lot to make sense of what we did in the workshop. So at some point we might be thinking about a follow up workshop. If you have an idea how to facilitate this, or happen to know a good online resource we could just use to work through, let us know.