DevOps & Docker Essentials

A practical guide for DevOps engineers

Last updated: 12/18/2025

Core DevOps Principles

DevOps bridges development and operations through:

CI/CD: Automated pipelines for testing and deployment
Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation
Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack
Collaboration: Shared responsibility between teams

Key DevOps Tools

Jenkins GitLab CI/CD GitHub Actions ArgoCD Kubernetes Docker Terraform Ansible

Docker Fundamentals

Containerization essentials:

Basic Commands

# Build an image
docker build -t myapp:latest .

# Run a container
docker run -d -p 8080:80 --name myapp myapp:latest

# View running containers
docker ps

# Inspect container logs
docker logs myapp

Dockerfile Best Practices

Use multi-stage builds
Minimize layer count
Use specific base image tags
Clean up apt cache in same RUN command

DevOps Workflow Example

A typical GitOps workflow:

Developer pushes code to Git repository
CI pipeline runs tests and builds artifacts
Container image is built and pushed to registry
CD pipeline updates Kubernetes manifests
ArgoCD detects changes and deploys to cluster
Monitoring systems verify deployment health

Recommended Resources

Books

"The Phoenix Project" by Gene Kim
"Site Reliability Engineering" by Google
"Docker Deep Dive" by Nigel Poulton