We’re excited to announce a new KubeAcademy course—Building Images. Designed for developers, devops engineers, and architects, this intermediate-level course covers different approaches for building images. Completing it will give you the skills and understanding needed to easily start building images and maintain them over time.
What you’ll learn in the course
The Building Images course consists of eight lessons, totaling just over an hour of material. Here’s a preview of what each lesson covers.
Introduction to Containerization
KubeAcademy Instructor Cora Iberkleid provides a brief introduction to containerization and sets the groundwork for the rest of the course.
Building Images with Dockerfile: Basic Syntax, App Launch, Tags, and Build Context
We’ll run through a few introductory examples to cover the basic syntax of Dockerfiles, including configuring the application launch command, using tags appropriately, and controlling the build context.
Building Images with Dockerfile: App Shutdown, Image Layers, and Caching
We’ll explore how Dockerfile configuration can impact application shutdown behavior. We also cover the layered nature of Docker images, the ability of layers to function as cache, and strategies for maximizing caching opportunities during image builds.
Building Images with Dockerfile: The Runtime User, Multistage Builds, and Inspecting Images
We’ll cover two basic strategies for improving security: setting the runtime user, and reducing the size and surface area of runtime images. We’ll also look at two utilities—docker inspect and dive—for inspecting images.
Build Images for Java Applications with JIB
Jib is a tool for building images from Java applications without using Docker or Dockerfiles. We’ll show you how to use Jib’s Maven and Gradle build plugins to configure and build images.
Building Images with Buildpacks: The Cloud Native Buildpacks Project
The Cloud Native Buildpacks project provides a simple but sophisticated approach for building images in a way that can be easily scaled and operationalized. We cover the motivations for the project, its API-based approach, and some of the implementations available in the ecosystem.
Building Images with Buildpacks: pack, Spring Boot, kpack, and Paketo Buildpacks
We’ll explore the features and functionality of cloud native buildpacks using three tools (platforms) for building images: the pack CLI, the Spring Boot build plugin, and the kpack hosted service. We’ll also explore the modularized buildpacks provided by Paketo Buildpacks for building images in a variety of languages.
Top Takeaways from the Building Images Course
We take a moment to review what we covered in the course.
About the instructor
KubeAcademy instructors are subject matter experts who volunteer their time to teach courses. Using their experience working on the VMware team of Kubernetes architects and trainers, as well as their personal experience with Kubernetes, our instructors design and deliver practical Kubernetes training.
Meet Cora Iberkleid, our newest KubeAcademy instructor. Cora designed and delivered the Building Images KubeAcademy course.
Cora is part developer advocate and part advisory solutions engineer at VMware. She helps developers and enterprises navigate and adopt modern practices and technologies including Spring, Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, and modern CI/CD.
Start learning on KubeAcademy today
Did we mention KubeAcademy is free? We invite you to create your own profile on KubeAcademy to track your progress, save your favorite courses, and earn achievements.
Don’t see the topic or course you’re looking for on KubeAcademy? Drop us a line at [email protected] to let us know. We’re always accepting requests for new topics as we continue to expand the KubeAcademy course catalog.
Enjoy the journey!
