How do I ‘containerize’ something, part 1: The Project

Containers, From the field, Journey to the Cloud, TechInfo 4 comments

Wow – what a journey I am on! It has been a realllly long time since I have felt like I was this new at something! As a part of my transformation from a solutions architect focused on hybrid cloud infrastructure to a solutions engineer focused on developer productivity, I am learning all kinds of new things, and I have frequently bitten off more than I can chew. The topic of today? How to use Docker to encapsulate an existing application into one or more containers.

So, back to basics. I am documenting here – for my own reinforcement – the process of ‘containerizing’ a running WordPress installation. Why WordPress? It’s really well understood, well documented, has a huge community of support, and – most importantly – I have used it for years. I have a functional understanding of how WordPress runs, I have built WordPress sites in the past, and I want to remove as much of the unknown for this exercise as possible.

I am thinking the effort will be split into multiple posts – it is likely to be long, with lots of technical detail. For those of you that have forgotten, or haven’t done it before, WordPress is an extremely popular blogging / publishing web platform, built with Apache and PHP and uses MySQL for a database. So, I am thinking the journey will look something like the following:

Of course I may have to reconfigure the order of those, or split them further into multiple posts, but that is what I am looking at for now. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I enjoy learning!

Stay tuned for the forthcoming installments!