Discussion on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Containers: A Foolproof, Hands-on Docker Tutorial (Part 1)"

Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him) · 2020-08-01T04:12:39.000Z

For a beginner, it is not an easy task to understand Docker. I will admit that I have struggled with using and understanding containers for a long time and I still have a lot to work on. There is a ton of subtleties that goes into solidly grasping th...

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

Great article! This can be a getting started guide for absolute beginners and explains the concepts and the need for dockers very well.

I know it is a personal choice and a lot of people like GIFs/Memes including me. But when I am reading this article, I felt they were a distraction or made the article a tad bit unprofessional. But I have no complaints as I didn't get too much disturbed and go elsewhere.

Couple of things I would have liked to see while reading the article:

Can you provide an example for Type-1 Bare-metal hypervisors too?
A simple example of Dockerfile would have been nice.
Since I know we use artifactory as our DockerRegistry, it is worth a mention about the possibility of private docker registries to along with the public ones.

Overall thoroughly enjoyed this article. Thank you for putting this together.

Thank you so much for the feedback! Let me address your points one by one:

Some common examples of Type-1 Hypervisors are Microsoft Hyper-V, Intel/Linux Xen, and VMWare ESXi. I did not want to gloss over VMs too much as, in and of itself, it's a topic worth its own article.
The Dockerfile and a lot more topics related to the hands-on aspects of building and running containers are in Part two of this guide!
I did mention fully private Docker Registries when linking to the Registry's image. Most commercial options are still based on Docker's Registry image!

Also, to mention the meme/GIF comment, I understand your point. The goal of this article is less to be a guide and more to spark a little bit of interest in a Docker newbie. In my experience, a lot of the entry-level courses are dry, unrelatable, and tend to scare away beginners, making them believe that these are topics way out of their league.

If I, as a barely-average tech person, can explain them in a fun, relatable way, be it through the use of hand-drawn GIFs or a meme that might be stuck in your head, that barrier might be seen as less impassable, and new Docker users might start to understand the other, much more professional and structured guides and tutorials.

That is my take on using less-than-professional visualizations in an otherwise technical article, and I hope that you might see the benefit as I am striving to pass it along :)

Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him) Thanks for explaining your point of view on using GIFs. I see what you are trying to do and am okay with it.

Thanks Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him) for the amazing article as I was able to grasp the concept as a beginner behind docker and how they work. And your examples on type-1 hypervisors made me relate and resonate with the article the more as I'm familiar with hyper-v virtualisation on windows OS. Thanks again👍, as I don't have to watch a 30 min YouTube video to understand docker and containers lol 😀😀

Thanks so much for replying to my RFA. Can't wait for the next part!

I happened to have started writing this article even before checking the RFAs, but I was definitely glad to discover that it was already a really requested topic. Guess I got lucky! Glad you liked and excited to publish the next installment in a few days!

A very nice overview of the concepts.

Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him) Can you recommend some resources for understanding Docker deeply?

Vivek Agrawal It might sound basic, but the official documentation really goes a long way. It might be a little bit dry to read, but if you are interested in getting deep into it, it is a gold mine.

I will continue making digestible (and illustrated) tutorials over the coming weeks, and I'll go as deep as necessary to be a competent user. I also plan to make some side-note articles where I try to explain to the best of my capabilities some of the more low-level concepts, but the main focus of this series is accessibility!

Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him) Amazing! Thanks for the detailed reply. I'll follow your advice :)

And I'll look forward to your future posts!

Let's connect on Twitter: twitter.com/vkwebdev

I love the gifs, whats you're secret 😉

A stupid amount of time on Excalidraw and great feedback while editing 😜

This is all I was looking for! Thanks for sharing!

Glad this worked for you, Luiz! Next week, we'll definitely go more hands-on, so you will not want to lose that.

Wow. This is absolutely amazing Antonio Lo Fiego (He/Him). Thanks for sharing.

Thank you, Edidiong. Glad you enjoyed the read!

Really amazing, thanks for sharing this.

Glad you like it, Bolaji!

Super interesting! Bookmarked- will read this over the weekend.

Let me know what you think about it, Sandeep!

Search Hashnode

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Containers: A Foolproof, Hands-on Docker Tutorial (Part 1)

Responses9