If you're going to move up, you need master the art of source control, code reviews, DevOps, monitoring, reporting, project management, and, oh yeah, other people. I got you. There is a rush that comes over you when you're responsible for shipping software for your client or boss. You have delivered, brought value, and made an impact. This is why we do this job: building software and changing the lives of the users that use it. Sure, coding is fun, but shipping is magical. It takes more than just drive and determination. As a senior developer or project lead, you have to know your tools and processes. Source control management, Agile practices, container orchestration, how to test correctly, and how to debug a crashing application in a very short amount of time. These skills are cultivated over time, and if you're lucky, you have a lead who is showing you how to do these things, hopefully the right way. If you're unlucky, like I was, you're teaching yourself, learning on the fly. If that's you, then this book is for you. I’m going to start at the very beginning, discussing source control and the nuances of using it and, as you might expect, I’ll be focusing on Git. It’s become the de facto source control provider and even if you disagree and hate it, it’s still something you’ll need to know if you’re going to work on a team in the software industry. The power of Docker lies in its speed and simplicity. You can create a container to do just about anything, from running Node, Python or Ruby scripts to housing your application data. In fact, you can do it all at once! Each service can do its thing and communicate with other services using some kind of message transport. This practice is called microservices, and I’m getting ahead of myself talking about it right now. We’ll discuss it in a later chapter, but I felt it was a good example of how Docker has upended software development and created entirely new ways to build an application. And it all starts with the idea of orchestrating these containers together. That’s what we’ll get into in this chapter, and we’re going to start out gracefully using Docker Compose and then ramp it up to more industrial strength solutions, including Kubernetes and “cloud native” offerings from the Big Cloud Providers. Welcome to the wild, fun world of DevOps!