Adrian Mouat

Author Archives: Adrian Mouat

Multi-Platform Docker Builds

This is a guest post from Docker Captain Adrian Mouat who is Chief Scientist at Container Solutions, a cloud-native consultancy and Kubernetes Certified Service Provider. Adrian is the author of “Using Docker,” published by O’Reilly Media. He is currently developing Trow, a container image registry designed to securely manage the flow of images in a Kubernetes cluster. Adrian is a regular conference speaker and trainer and he has spoken at several events including KubeCon EU, DockerCon, CraftConf, TuringFest and GOTO Amsterdam.

Docker images have become a standard tool for testing and deploying new and third-party software. I’m the main developer of the open source Trow registry and Docker images are the primary way people install the tool. If I didn’t provide images, others would end up rolling their own which would duplicate work and create maintenance issues.

By default, the Docker images we create run on the linux/amd64 platform. This works for the majority of development machines and cloud providers but leaves users of other platforms out in the cold. This is a substantial audience – think of home-labs built from Raspberry Pis, companies producing IoT devices, organisations running on IBM mainframes and clouds utilising low-power arm64 chips. Users of Continue reading

Tips and Tricks of the Docker Captains

My talk at DockerCon EU was designed to provide the audience with a bunch of tips for making the most of Docker. The tips were inspired by suggestions, blogs and presentations by other Docker Captains as well members of the larger Docker community.

The motivation for the talk was to enable users to quickly gain a higher level of proficiency and understanding in Docker. The metaphor I use is with traditional carpentry tools; whilst a novice can pick up a saw and cut a piece of wood, an expert will be able to do the same job more quickly, more accurately, and with less frustration. The reason why is partly experience, but also because the expert has a more thorough understanding-of and affinity-with her tools. The tips in my talk are designed both to reduce frustration and increase efficiency when working with Docker.

To give an example, one of the tips I present is on configuring the `docker ps` output format. By default `docker ps` prints out a really long line that looks messy except on the widest of terminals. You can fix this by using the `--format` argument to pick what fields you’re interested in e. Continue reading