Lisa McNicol

Author Archives: Lisa McNicol

Docker’s 6th Birthday: How do you #Docker?

 

 

Docker is turning 6 years old! Over the years, Docker Community members have found some amazing and innovative ways of using Docker technology and we’ve been blown away by all the use-cases we’ve seen from the community at DockerCon. From Docker for Space where NASA used Docker technology to build software to deflect asteroids to using “gloo” to glue together traditional apps, microservices and serverless, you all continue to amaze us year over year.

So this year, we want to celebrate you! From March 18th to the 31st, Docker User Groups all over the world will be hosting local birthday show-and-tell celebrations. Participants will each have 10-15 minutes of stage time to present how they’ve been using Docker. Think of these as lightning talks – your show-and-tell doesn’t need to be polished and it can absolutely be a fun hack and/or personal project. Everyone who presents their work will get a Docker Birthday #6 t-shirt and have the opportunity to submit their Docker Birthday Show-and-tell to present at DockerCon.

Are you new to Docker? Not sure you’d like to present? No worries! Join in the fun and come along to listen, learn, add to your sticker collection and Continue reading

Docker SF Chapter Meetup: BuildKit and Container Orchestration

Last week, we had a great turnout for the Docker San Francisco chapter event at HQ! The meetup was focused on two of the most popular talks from DockerCon on BuildKit and container orchestration with Kubernetes and Docker Swarm. The purpose was to give people who couldn’t attend these talks a chance to hear to hear them live,  provide the opportunity to ask the speakers questions and network with other members of the container ecosystem.

‘Introduction to BuildKit: the Next Generation Builder Component’

Watch Tibor Vass’ Presentation

First, we had Tibor Vass, a software engineer on the Engine Team at Docker and maintainer of the Docker project since 2014, take the podium with his talk ‘Introduction to BuildKit: the Next Generation Builder Component’. In this talk, Tibor went into detail about the latest developments around the builder component of the Docker Platform including BuildKit, a toolkit that builds on containerd to provide next-generation capabilities for building software with the help of containers. Watch his talk to learn about the architecture and design choices of BuildKit’s frontend model, how to use BuildKit directly, and how to leverage its features in Docker. There were a number of great questions from particularly engaged community members!

 

Docker Birthday #5: Thank you Docker Community! 

Docker Birthday

Last month, Docker turned five! In celebration of this milestone, we turned the spotlight on our amazing global community of customers, users, Community Leaders, Captains, mentors, partners and sponsors, and asked them to reflect on their Docker learning journey. Everyone came together to celebrate how far they had come, think about where they would like to go and take that next step towards reaching their goal.

We invite you to do the same. Whether you just want to test the waters, or want to dive right in, there are a variety of ways for you to take the next step on your Docker journey:

Just getting started and want to learn the basics? Check out the Play with Docker Classroom and work through our self paced labs to learn about containers and the Docker platform.

Want to learn about the latest update to Docker Enterprise Edition ? Join Docker and thousands of your peers for the Docker Continue reading

Docker in Higher Education: Announcing Tools & Resources for Teachers

Docker in Higher Education.png

At the beginning of the summer we published a blog post announcing the Docker Student Developer Kit and Campus Ambassador program. The positive reception from students has been overwhelming and we were so excited to see hundreds of applications flood in!

Many teachers took notice of the enthusiasm of their students and began to reach out, asking us for tools, resources and support in using Docker in the classroom and adding Docker to their curriculum. To this end we have put together a free package for teachers!

Making use of this offer will enable teachers to effectively use and teach Docker in the classroom as we will be able to provide:

  1. Free Tools: eliminating the need for students to install anything locally, thus saving you valuable class time
  2. Resources: the most up to date presentations, hands-on labs, workshops etc. on every topic for every skill level
  3. Support and recognition: you will have a dedicated contact at Docker to help you through the process and also be welcomed into the online Docker Teachers community where you can collaborate and learn from other educators

If you are a teacher at a higher-education institution who would like to unlock the benefits outlined Continue reading

Announcing the Docker Student Developer Kit & Campus Ambassador Program!

For quite some time now we have been receiving daily requests from students all over the world, asking for our help learning Docker, using Docker and teaching their peers how to use Docker. We love their enthusiasm, so we decided it was time to reach out to the student community and give them the helping hand they need!

Docker Education

 

Understanding how to use Docker is now a must have skill for students. Here are 5 reasons why:

  1. Understanding how to use Docker is one of the most important skills to learn if you want to advance in a career in tech, according to Business Insider.
  2. You can just start coding instead of spending time setting up your environment.
  3. You can collaborate easily with your peers and enable seamless group work: Docker eliminates any ‘works on my machine’ issues.
  4. Docker allows you to easily build applications with a modern microservices architecture.
  5. Using Docker will greatly enhance the security of your applications.

Getting Started with Docker

Are you a student who is excited about the prospect of using Docker but still don’t know exactly what Docker is or where to start learning? Now that your finals are over and you have all Continue reading

Meet the winners of the Holberton School and Docker hackathon

The last weekend in February, Holberton School and Docker held a joint Docker Hackathon where current students spent 24 hours making cool Docker hacks. Students were joined by Docker mentors who helped them along the way in addition to serving as judges for the final products. 

Here are some highlights from the hackathon.

Third place goes to… Julien, a personal assistant built with Docker and Alexa by Bobby and Larry

In their own words:

After discussing a few ideas, we settled on the idea of doing a Docker/Alexa integration that would abstract away repetitive command line interactions, allowing the user/developer to check the state of her Docker containers, and easily deploy them to production, only using voice commands. Hands free, we would prompt Alexa to interact with our Docker images and containers in various ways (ex1: “spin up image file x on server y”, “list all running containers on server z”, “deploy image a from server x to server y”) and Alexa would do it.

The main technical hurdle of the project was securely communicating between Alexa and our VMs running. To do this we used  the Java JSch library. This class gave us the ability to programmatically shell into Continue reading

Docker Online Meetup recap: Introducing Docker 1.13

Last week, we released Docker 1.13 to introduce several new enhancements in addition to building on and improving Docker swarm mode introduced in Docker 1.12. Docker 1.13 has many new features and fixes that we are excited about, so we asked core team member and release captain, Victor Vieux to introduce Docker 1.13 in an online meetup.

The meetup took place on Wednesday, Jan 25 and over 1000 people RSVPed to hear Victor’s presentation live. Victor gave an overview and demo of many of the new features:

  • Restructuration of CLI commands
  • Experimental build
  • CLI backward compatibility
  • Swarm default encryption at rest
  • Compose to Swarm
  • Data management commands
  • Brand new “init system”
  • Various orchestration enhancements

In case you missed it, you can watch the recording and access Victor’s slides below.

 

Below is a short list of the questions asked to Victor at the end of the Online meetup:

Q: What will happened if we call docker stack deploy multiple times to the same file?

A: All the services that were modified in the compose file will be updated according to their respective update policy. It won’t recreate a new stack, update the current one. Same Continue reading

Docker & Prometheus Joint Holiday Meetup Recap

Last Wednesday we had our 52nd meetup at Docker HQ, but this time we joined forces with the Prometheus user group to host a mega-meetup! There was a great turnout and members were excited to see the talks on using Docker with Prometheus, OpenTracing and the new Docker playground; play-with-docker.

First up was Stephen Day, a Senior Software Engineer at Docker, who presented a talk entitled, ‘The History of Metrics According to Me’. Stephen believes that metrics and monitoring should be built into every piece of software we create, from the ground up. By solving the hard parts of application metrics in Docker, he thinks it becomes more likely that metrics are a part of your services from the start. See the video of his intriguing talk and slides below.

Next up was Ben Sigelman, an expert in distributed tracing, whose talk ‘OpenTracing Isn’t Just Tracing: Measure Twice, Instrument Once’ was both informative and humorous. He Continue reading

Docker San Francisco Meetup #50: Swarm Mode

Last Wednesday was Docker’s 50th meetup in San Francisco! There was an awesome turnout from the local Docker community to see Docker’s own Nishant Totla and Dongluo Chen and their talk on Swarm Mode.

Nishant and Dongluo gave a talk entitled ‘Using Docker Swarm Mode and healthchecks to Deploy Applications Without Loss’ where they demonstrated how to do service upgrades without impacting your application.

 

They explained that Docker swarm mode enables users to manage their applications with service primitives and the healthcheck feature provides health indications for a container. Coming up in the Docker 1.13 release, Docker Swarm can connect healthcheck results with load balancers to implement no-loss service upgrade. Check out the talk including Nishant’s demo in the video below.

 

 

Want to learn more about the Docker platform and Docker’s open source projects?


New blog post w/ Continue reading

Docker Community Spotlight: Nimret Sandhu

Nimret Sandhu.jpg

Nimret Sandhu has shown himself to be a key player in the success of the Docker Seattle Meetup group; and now with almost 2000 eager members,  organizing engaging events has become quite the responsibility! On top of his busy work schedule at Dev9, his extracurricular activities and a family life, Nimret took the time to tell us his Docker story, his favorite thing about the Docker Community and also departed with some words of wisdom for anyone just starting a meetup group.

 

Tell us about your first experience with Docker. What drew you to joining as an organizer for the Docker Seattle Meetup group?

My first experience with Docker was when our company, Dev9, looked into partnering with this up-and-coming startup named Docker a couple of years ago. Since I’m a long time *nix user who’s been exposed to solaris zones, bsd jails, etc. in the past, I looked into it, and immediately realized the potential. Once I downloaded and played around with it, I was so blown away by the technology that I started evangelizing it to our clients. I gave a talk on it and volunteered to help out with the Docker Seattle Meetup. I had already been running the Continue reading

Announcing Docker 1.12 Hackathon winners

The judges have deliberated, our community has voted, and the results are in! We are happy to announce the top 5 submissions of the Docker 1.12 Hackathon.

In case you missed it, the theme of the hackathon was to build, ship, and run a distributed software application using a release candidate of Docker 1.12. We encouraged participants to hack the new features included in Docker 1.12, such as: Swarm Mode, Cryptographic node identity, Service API, and Build-in routing mesh.

Continue reading