Painless Docker - 2nd Edition

Who This Guide is For

This guide doesn't assume any prior knowledge of Docker or containers - it was designed for all levels of expertise, from beginners to experienced practitioners.

Painless Docker is for:

• System administrators who want to reduce configuration drift, eliminate snowflake servers, and move from manual provisioning to reproducible, automated environments. Containers give sysadmins a way to standardize deployments, simplify upgrades and rollbacks, and regain control over increasingly complex systems without multiplying operational effort.

• Software engineers who want a reliable way to build, package, and ship applications without fighting environment mismatches. Docker allows engineers to define their runtime once, test it everywhere, and deliver software that behaves the same on a laptop, in CI, and in production. This guide focuses on practical patterns that make applications easier to deploy, debug, and maintain.

• DevOps practitioners who want to design CI/CD pipelines that are faster, safer, and easier to reason about. Containers turn builds, tests, and deployments into repeatable units that can be promoted across environments with confidence. Docker becomes the foundation for automation, immutable releases, and low-risk deployments rather than another tool to babysit.

• Platform engineers