Over the last couple of years, containers have become a hot topic. They allow you to package any application, any tool, written in any language, and deploy it on a basic host or cluster. When implementing DevOps, containers can be of tremendous value. That is why DevOps and containers are often mentioned in the same breath. However, they are not the same thing. While DevOps is more of a cultural thing, containers are a type of technology, an alternative way of hosting your applications.

In this chapter, you will learn more about containers and how they work. This is achieved by exercises wherein custom container images are created and run on different hosting platforms, such as Azure Container Instances and Kubernetes.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• An introduction to containers
• Building a container image
• Building images in Azure DevOps and running them in Azure
• An introduction to Kubernetes
• Kubernetes in action
• Upgrading containers
• Scaling containers and Kubernetes
• Deploying to Kubernetes with Azure DevOps