Welcome to Docker on Amazon Web Services! I'm very excited to have written this book and to share how to leverage the wonderful technologies that the Docker and Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystems provide to build truly world-class solutions for deploying and operating your applications in production.
Docker has become the modern standard for building, packaging, publishing, and operating applications, leveraging the power of containers to increase the speed of application delivery, increase security, and reduce costs. This book will show you how to supercharge your process of building Docker applications, using the best practices of continuous delivery to provide a fully automated, consistent, reliable, and portable workflow for testing, building, and publishing your Docker applications. In my view, this is a fundamental prerequisite before you even consider deploying your application to the cloud, and the first few chapters will focus on establishing a local Docker environment and creating a local continuous delivery workflow for a sample application that we will be using throughout the book.
AWS is the world's leading public cloud provider, and provides a rich set of solutions for managing and operating your Docker applications. This book will cover all of the major services that AWS provides to support Docker and containers, including the Elastic Container Service (ECS), Fargate, Elastic Beanstalk, and Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and also will discuss how you can leverage the Docker for AWS solution provided by Docker Inc to deploy Docker Swarm clusters.
Running a complete application environment in AWS comprises much more than your container platform, and this book will also describe best practices for managing access to your AWS account and leveraging other AWS services to support the requirements of your applications. For example, you will learn how to set up AWS application load balancers to publish highly available, load-balanced endpoints for your application, create AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) instances to provide a managed application database, integrate your applications with the AWS Secrets Manager to provide a secure secrets management solution, and create a complete continuous delivery pipeline using the AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CloudFormation services that will automatically test, build, and publish Docker images for any new changes to your application, and then automatically deploy it into development and production environments.
You will build all of this supporting infrastructure using the AWS CloudFormation service, which provides powerful infrastructure-as-code templates that allow you define all of the AWS services and resources I have mentioned in a single manifest that you can deploy to AWS with a single click of a button.
I'm sure by now you are just as excited as I am to learn about all of these wonderful technologies, and I'm sure by the end of this book, you will have developed the expert knowledge and skills required to be able to deploy and manage your Docker applications, using the latest cutting-edge techniques and best practices.
