da Agency

Docker Captain Take 5 – Nana Janashia

Docker Captains are select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others. “Docker Captains Take 5” is a regular blog series where we get a closer look at our Captains and ask them the same broad set of questions ranging from what their best Docker tip is to whether they prefer cats or dogs (personally, we like whales and turtles over here). Today, we’re interviewing Nana who has been a Docker Captain since 2021. She runs the YouTube channel TechWorld with Nana and is based in Austria.

How/when did you first discover Docker?

In a project I was working on as a junior software developer. I joined a team developing an IoT system where they had selected some of the cool modern technologies and Docker was one of them. 

Since Docker was just one of the many technologies we were using in the project, and because of the project deadlines, I was only able to learn just bits and pieces of Docker concepts during the project implementation phase, instead of a proper thorough introduction right at the beginning. So it took me two years to get a good big picture understanding of Docker, where I felt confident I really knew the tool. 

From today’s perspective, I wish I had just worked through a 3-4 hour crash course and properly learned it at the beginning. 

What is your favorite Docker command?

`docker exec -it container-id` 

I use it a lot when playing around with containers, testing and debugging stuff. 

What is your top tip for working with Docker that others may not know?

Running docker scan to check for any vulnerabilities in your images. This can give you a lot of confidence to know what kind of images you are producing and deploying. 

What’s the coolest Docker demo you have done/seen ?

For my DevOps bootcamp I built a scenario, where: 

I took a simple Nodejs application, dockerized it using a Dockerfile, added docker-compose file to run a database service and the application with, then configured a fully-automated CI/CD pipeline thatbuilt the image from this Dockerfile, pushed it to a private Docker registry, then automatically incremented the docker image version in a docker-compose file, copied it to an EC2 server, with Docker already installed on and started the application and its database by running docker-compose up on the ec2 server and finally validate that the application was deployed and the endpoint was accessible. 

It was really fun to see how Docker can be integrated so well with all these different technologies