Azure part of story

• First create one Azure account, I am using a student account
• Create a basic instance (Ubuntu image works for most cases) with 1 vCPU and 1 GiB RAM, or according to your needs
• Download the private key and SSH into the instance
• Update the packages
• Install docker (following this guide)

Let’s move on to the local machine setup

Local machine setup

SSH Keys Setup

• We need to install docker here as well
• Add ssh key (downloaded from Azure portal) to OpenSSH Auth agent

eval 'ssh-agent'
ssh-add <path-to-pem-file>/<file-name>.pem

• (or) Add AddKeysToAgent yes to ~/.ssh/config file to automatically do that for you

echo "AddKeysToAgent yes" >> ~/.ssh/config

Docker Context Setup

• Create a new docker context to talk to the docker in Azure instance with command

docker context create azure-box --docker "host=ssh://azureuser@<public-ip-of-instance>"

• See all available contexts using docker context ls
• Switching to Azure docker is done using command docker context use azure-box and back to the local docker using docker context use default
• Now when we issue commands to docker as usual docker ps, it is directly communicating to the docker running in the Azure instance

Note: ‘azure-box’ is just a name, can be replaced with anything of your choice

🎉 Now you have docker running in the cloud, accessible from the terminal

Finally just for testing, we can spin up a Ubuntu container and bash into it: