Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with Containers and Container-related technology in AWS, and one conversation that keeps coming up over and over again is, “How do I get started containerizing my application?” and similarly, “How do I get my container running in the cloud?”

There are lots of resources available to answer these questions, but I find usually:

1. These resources don’t take you all the way to the beginning, or…
2. They have too many bells and whistles, with lots of “magic” going on behind the scenes.

In this post, I’m going to assume you are a developer who knows his/her craft very well. You know your code, you know how to build it, and how to get it running. (In this example, we’ll be using Java, but the example can be applied to almost any web language or framework.) Instead, I will assume that you need a ground-up example of how to containerize and start your application in the cloud, so we will focus on that.