DockerCon LIVE 2021 Recapped: Top 5 Sessions

You came, you participated, you learned. You helped us pull off another DockerCon — and, my fellow developers, it was good. How good? About 80,000 folks registered for the May 27 virtual event — on a par with last year.

We threw a lot at you, from demos and product announcements to company updates and more — all of it focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world. But some clear favorites emerged. Here’s a rundown of the top 5 sessions, which zeroed in on some of the everyday issues and challenges facing our developer community.

#1. How Much Kubernetes Do I Need to Learn?

Kubernetes isn’t simple and the learning curve is steep, but the upside to mastering this powerful and flexible system is huge. So it’s natural for developers to ask how much Kubernetes is “just enough” to get productive. Clearly, many of you shared that question, making this the Número Uno session of DockerCon LIVE 2021. Docker Captain Elton Stoneman, a consultant and trainer at Sixeyed Consulting, walks you through the Kubernetes platform, clarifying core concepts around services, deployments, replica sets, pods, config maps and secrets, and sharing demos to show how they all work together. He also shows how simple and complex apps are defined as Kubernetes manifests, and clarifies the line between dev and ops.

#2. A Pragmatic Tour of Docker Filesystems

Mutagen founder Jacob Howard takes on the heroic task of dispelling the mists of confusion that developers often encounter when starting out with containerized development. Sure, container filesystems can seem like an impenetrable mess, but Jacob carefully makes the case for why the relationship between file systems and containers actually makes a lot of sense, even to non-developers. He also provides a pragmatic guide to container filesystem concepts, options and performance that can serve as a rule of thumb for selecting the right solution(s) for your use case.

#3. Top Dockerfile Security Best Practices

In this webinar, Alvaro Iradier Muro, an integrations engineer at Sysdig, goes deep on Dockerfile best practices for image builds to help you prevent security issues and optimize containerized applications. He shows you straightforward ways to avoid unnecessary privileges, reduce the attack surface with multistage builds, prevent confidential data leaks, detect bad practices and more, including how to go beyond image building to harden container security at runtime. It all comes down to building well-crafted Dockerfiles, and Alvaro shows how to do so by removing known risks in advance, so you can reduce security management and operational overhead.

#4. Databases on Containers

Only in the last few years has running high-performance stateful applications inside containers become a reality — a shift made possible by the rise of Kubernetes and performance improvements in Docker. Denis Souza Rosa, a developer advocate at Couchbase, answers many of the common questions that arise in connection with this new normal: Why should I run these applications inside containers in the first place? What are the challenges? Is it production ready? In this demo, Denis deploys a database and operator long with fail nodes, and he shows how to scale up and down with almost no manual intervention using state-of-the-art technology.

#5. A Day in the Life of a Developer: Moving Code from Development to Production Without Losing Control

Learn how to take control of your development process in ways you never thought possible with Nick Chase, director of technical marketing and developer relations at Mirantis. Nick zeroes in on how only a true software development pipeline can prevent serious problems such as security holes, configuration errors, and business issues such as executive approval for promotion of changes. Along the way, he covers what a complete software supply chain looks like, common “weak links” and how to strengthen them, how to integrate your workflow as a developer, and what to do when business concerns affect the pipeline.

If you missed these popular sessions last month, now’s your chance to catch them. Or maybe you just want to see them again. Either way, check out the recordings. They’re informative, practical and free!

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