Docker Course Projects

A lab-driven course through Docker from first principles — not just docker run, but understanding what containers actually are and how they differ from virtual machines.

Lab progression

Lab 1-2 — Container fundamentals

• Images vs containers, the layer model, and why immutability matters
• docker build with multi-stage builds to minimise final image size
• Understanding the Docker daemon, client-server architecture, and the container runtime

Lab 3 — Networking

• Bridge networks, host networking, and overlay networks
• Container DNS resolution — containers communicate by service name, not IP
• Publishing ports, --network flag, and inter-container communication

Lab 4 — Storage and volumes

• Bind mounts vs named volumes vs tmpfs
• Volume lifecycle: create, inspect, prune
• Using volumes for database persistence across container restarts

Lab 5-6 — Docker Compose

• Multi-service applications with docker-compose.yml
• Service dependencies with depends_on and health checks
• Environment variable injection and secrets management
• Scaling services with docker compose up --scale

Lab 7 — Private registry

• Running a private Docker registry with registry:2
• Tagging and pushing images to a local registry
• Pull policies and authentication

Lab 8 — Docker Swarm

• Initialising a Swarm cluster, manager vs worker nodes
• Deploying stacks with docker stack deploy
• Service replicas, rolling updates, and drain/activate node states

Lab 9 — Kubernetes comparison

• Side-by-side: what Swarm does vs what Kubernetes does
• When Swarm is enough and when Kubernetes is needed
• Key Kubernetes concepts: Pods, Deployments, Services, Ingress

Why Docker is worth understanding deeply

A Docker container is just a process with a namespaced view of the filesystem and network. Understanding namespaces, cgroups, and the OCI spec makes you a better developer regardless of whether you write Dockerfiles every day.