Containers in Production

Docker containers are appearing everywhere. They give you a reproducible and isolated environment for your code to run in. Great, so how do I take my container and run it in production? I need load balancing, service discovery, autoscaling, logging etc. and they don't magically appear in container land.

All the big cloud providers offer hosted ways for you to run Docker containers in production. This is great because most of us don't have a large ops team to set that up. Unfortunately these systems still require a fair amount of setup and configuration to run a production ready service. With a particular focus on the AWS and cross-platform tools available, I'll show you how to launch a containerised service on each of them and go through why you might pick one over another.