Dockerizing an MSSQL Server (header image)

Dockerizing an MSSQL Server: Unlocking Flexibility

Alex Cassells Articles, Databases, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, SQL, SQL Server, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Docker is a pretty magical tool that streamlines server and environment setup while helping to eliminate the operating system and software version variables. It’s one of the best ways to mitigate the classic ‘Works on my machine!’ obstacle many developers run into when sharing or promoting their code.

When a lot of people think of Docker, the last thing they think of is Microsoft or Windows. It took many years for Docker to even officially support Windows. As a .NET developer, I always wanted the stability that Docker offers, and today, I can have it. In the post below, I’ll dive into how to dockerize an MSSQL Server.

Dev Container CLI Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Dev Container CLI: Escaping the IDE Restrictions

Jake Everhart API Development, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Programming 1 Comment

In past blogs, I have discussed development containers (dev containers) in detail, from explaining their general mechanics to showing how they can bolster a team’s build automation. As a brief recap for the uninitiated: dev containers are a way of encapsulating a developer’s setup into a container, typically a Docker container. As a practical example, rather than forcing a new teammate to manually install and configure all the necessary tooling before contributing to a project, they can leverage a team’s devcontainer.json definition file to quickly spin up a fully configured development environment.

Microsoft has championed this workflow over the past few years, offering tight integration with tools like VS Code and Codespaces to make containerized development as seamless as possible. At the time of writing, the developer experience has reached a point where I honestly prefer to operate within a dev container for certain types of projects. When I open a team’s codebase within VS Code and it informs me that they have provided a dev container to use, I have higher confidence that I’ll be using the same versions of their tools and seeing the behaviors that they expect.

I’ve even come to trust these setups more than an equivalent set of Dockerfiles or docker-compose scripts, just because the simplicity of the ecosystem makes it more likely that everything is well-maintained and configured correctly. It’s easy to see how these standardization and automation benefits can be a huge boost to teams…once they’ve adopted the right tools to integrate with them.

But what if you don’t want to use VS Code?

Leveraging Docker to Quickly Setup an Object Detection API

Adam Costenbader API Development, Articles, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Tutorial 1 Comment

In this blog, we utilize the strengths of Docker containers to quickly spin up two separate containers that we can utilize for our software development needs – one running the DeepStack API software and the other running a utility to help us get started with the DeepStack API.

The best part is that once we are comfortable with our setup, we could quickly and easily stop and remove the DeepStackUI utility container to free up resources all while continuing to run the DeepStack API software without interruption.

How and Why to Containerize Your Development

John Hoestje Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Opinion, Python, Tutorial Leave a Comment

This is a tutorial for how to use the VS Code Remote-Containers extension to containerize your development environment. First, I will discuss my reasons for separating my programming environment and why virtual machines didn’t work. Then, I’ll show a simple example using a containerized Python development environment. Finally, I’ll give you my reasons why containerizing the development environment fits what I’m looking for in a solution.

Azure Web Apps in Docker Containers – Part 1

Joe Sciara Architecture, Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Tutorial Leave a Comment

So you want to host a web application on Azure with minimal overhead, but how is this done? Azure makes it possible by running an App Service using Docker containers. Setting up an App Service is simple and can be accomplished with a few steps.

In this blog, I’ll explain the steps necessary to generate a Docker image in Azure. Then, we will deploy a web application based on an image we generate. We host the application with the following steps:
1. Create a Container Registry
2. Build a Docker image
3. Create a Web App