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Outfitting an IT training environment with Docker containers

Trainer Container

Article from ADMIN 32/2016

By Balasubramanian Thangaraju , By Rajesh Srivastava

Docker provide a fast and easy means for giving the students in an IT lab access a personal work environment.

Containers offer better performance than virtual machines because containers consume fewer resources and don't require a hypervisor. Containers also isolate a work environment from the rest of the system, so a user working within the container can't bring down the server or damage other user spaces. We put Docker containers to work on a problem we had on our network: creating workspaces for users in IT training support classes. Using Docker and some basic shell scripting, we built an automated environment where we could create temporary containers for each user in a lab class and delete those containers at the end of the session.

A Script for Creating Containers

Docker Hub [1] is a repository for Docker images. You'll need a standard Linux Docker image for creating containers. Docker Hub offers images for different Linux flavors, including Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS.

This article assumes you have Docker up and running on your Linux system. If you don't have Docker on your system currently, you'll need to install the necessary and dependent packages – see the documentation for your own Linux distribution.

The next step is to download the base Docker image from the registry by executing the command

$docker pull <image>

where <image> is name of the any official Linux flavor from the Docker registry [2].The downloaded image has minimal utilities for executing shell scripts or basic Unix commands.

You can configure the Docker image to add more functionality. For example, in a development environment, one needs a good editor, manual pages, and compilers for different programming languages, debuggers, and system monitoring tools.

The next step is to create and run the container for a user.

As the sys

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