Introduction

The ideal way to give your program to someone else to use is either as source code that they can download and compile (with a build tool!), then install on their system.

But… sometimes our software grows to be so complex that it has dependencies on other software. Sometimes our software grows to be so complex that it has dependencies on specific versions of software, and it’s not exactly reasonable for you to expect someone to have that specific version on their computer.

Sometimes you want to use software that has these same kind of dependencies. Maybe you want to try out a piece of software, but you can’t or don’t want to install all of those dependencies on your main workstation.

Maybe you just want to have a Linux distribution installed on your main machine without having to fully commit to using Linux all the time. It’s OK! We can do that!

A container is a way that we can package software and dependencies together. Virtual machines are software that allow us to run entire operating systems on our computer without actually installing the operating system as our main environment.

“The Cloud”™ makes extensive use of containers and virtual machines.

This week we’re going to spend some time setting up virtual machine software on our computers, running a pre-installed operating system in the virtual machine software, running commands in a container, configuring a container, and setting up servers in “The Cloud”™