Create Different Images for Different Deployment Tasks

A key concept of using containers is the ability to create one image based on another and you should use this technique to build up a collection of images from which you can choose the most appropriate image for the job at hand. The following are examples of this approach:

• If you create an image containing COBOL Server you can use it to run your applications but you can't interact with it. Creating an interactive login image enables you to log in to a running container that contains your COBOL Server environment so that you can manually run commands and observe what is happening in the container.

  Images such as this typically have a suffix of _login in their repository name. For example, if you create an image called microfocus/cobolserver:rhel7_8.0_x64 the image that lets you log in would be called microfocus/cobolserver:rhel7_8.0_x64_login.

• If your applications require a particular version of Java you can add that to your image, ensuring that your applications always have the required files available. You can use a suffix of _java for an image to indicate that it includes Java.