Welcome to Exploring Containers🔗
A container isn't a tiny virtual machine, and knowing how to run docker build doesn't mean you know what's actually isolating your process from everything else on the box. This site covers containerization as its own topic — not a Kubernetes prerequisite, not a Docker cheat sheet, but the full stack from kernel primitives to production supply-chain security.
Who Is This For?🔗
Start where you are. The tiers build in order, but jump to whatever you need.
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Day One — Your App Has to Become a Container
Either you're shipping a single app — a web service, an API, an ETL job — and it has to be containerized before anyone else can run it. Or you've inherited a monolith and someone's told you it's leaving the VMs, which means learning to think in services for the first time.
Day One covers both paths, from what a container actually is to your first working image.
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Essentials — Running Containers with Intent
You're building images, not just running someone else's. You want to know Docker and Podman well enough to reach for the right one, and understand what a runtime actually does.
Essentials covers the tools and the fundamentals underneath them.
Coming soon
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Efficiency — Beyond the Single Container
Multi-container apps, registries you host yourself, and the runtime layer Kubernetes depends on. This is where "it works on my machine" turns into a real deployment story.
Efficiency covers composition, distribution, and the CRI.
Coming soon
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Mastery — Production Containers
Supply chain trust, image signing, SBOMs, and choosing a runtime for workloads that need real isolation guarantees.
Mastery is for the platform engineers who own this in production.
Coming soon
Why a Site Just for Containers?🔗
Container runtimes (containerd, CRI-O, runc), the OCI image and runtime specs, Docker and Podman as tools, and the security discipline around all of it are each deep enough to stand on their own — Kubernetes just consumes containers as its unit of deployment, it doesn't teach what one is. Containers sit in the middle of the stack: built out of the Linux kernel features covered on Exploring Linux, and consumed as the unit of deployment by the orchestration covered on Exploring Kubernetes. This site owns that middle layer, so every other site can assume you already know what a container is.
Where This Fits
If you're looking for how Kubernetes uses containers — kubelet, the CRI, Pods, initContainers — that's on Exploring Kubernetes. This site owns the container itself: the runtime, the image, the tool, the isolation.