Ben De St Paer-Gotch, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Ben De St Paer-Gotch

Author Archives: Ben De St Paer-Gotch

Advanced Image Management in Docker Hub

We are excited to announce the latest feature for Docker Pro and Team users, our new Advanced Image Management Dashboard available on Docker Hub. The new dashboard provides developers with a new level of access to all of the content you have stored in Docker Hub providing you with more fine grained control over removing old content and exploring old versions of pushed images.

Historically in Docker Hub we have had visibility into the latest version of a tag that a user has pushed, but what has been very hard to see or even understand is what happened to all of those old things that you pushed. When you push an image to Docker Hub you are pushing a manifest, a list of all of the layers of your image, and the layers themselves.

When you are updating an existing tag, only the new layers will be pushed along with the new manifest which references these layers. This new manifest will be given the tag you specify when you push, such as bengotch/simplewhale:latest. But this does mean that all of those old manifests which point at the previous layers that made up your image are removed from Hub. These Continue reading

WSL 2 GPU Support is Here

At Microsoft Build in the first half of the year, Microsoft demonstrated some awesome new capabilities and improvements that were coming to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 including the ability to share the host machine’s GPU with WSL 2 processes. Then in June Craig Loewen from Microsoft announced that developers working on the Windows insider ring machines could now make use of GPU for the Linux workloads. This support for NVIDIA CUDA enabled developers and data scientists to use their local Windows machines for inner-loop development and experimentation.

Last week, during the Docker Community All Hands, we announced the availability of a developer preview build of Docker Desktop for WSL 2 supporting GPU for our Developer Preview Program. We already have more than 1,000 who have joined us to help test preview builds of Docker Desktop for Windows (and Mac!). If you’re interested in joining the program for future releases you should do it now!

Today we are excited to announce the general preview of Docker Desktop support for GPU with Docker in WSL2. There are over one and a half million users of Docker Desktop for Windows today and we saw in our roadmap how excited you Continue reading

? Docker Hub Experimental CLI tool

We are excited to let you know that we have released a new experimental tool. We would love to get your feedback on it. Today we have released an experimental Docker Hub CLI tool, the hub-tool. The new Hub CLI tool lets you explore, inspect and manage your content on Docker Hub as well as work with your teams and manage your account.

The new tool is available as of today for Docker Desktop for Mac and Windows users and we will be releasing this for Linux in early 2021.

The hub-tool is designed to map as closely to the top level features we know people are using in Docker Hub and provide a new way for people to start interacting with and managing their content. Let’s start by taking a look at the top level options we have.

What you can do

We can see that we have the ability to jump into your account, your content, your orgs and your personal access tokens.

From here I can dive into one of my repos

And from here I can then decide to list the tags in one of those repos. This also now lets me see when Continue reading

Introducing Docker Engine 20.10

We are pleased to announce that we have completed the next major release of the Docker Engine 20.10. This release continues Docker’s investment in our community Engine adding multiple new features including support for cgroups V2, moving multiple features out of experimental including docker run --mount and rootless, along with a ton of other improvements to the API, client and build experience. The full list of changes can be found as part of our change log.

Docker engine is the underlying tooling/client that enables users to easily build, manage, share and run their container objects on Linux. The Docker engine is made up of 3 core components:

A server with a long-running daemon process dockerd.
APIs which specify interfaces that programs can use to talk to and instruct the Docker daemon.
A command line interface (CLI) client docker.

For those who are curious about the recent questions about Docker Engine/K8s, please have a look at Dieu’s blog to learn more.

Along with this I want to give a huge thank you to everyone in the community and all of our maintainers who have also contributed towards this Engine release. Without their contribution, hard work and support we Continue reading

Docker Compose for Amazon ECS Now Available

Docker is pleased to announce that as of today the integration with Docker Compose and Amazon ECS has reached V1 and is now GA!

We started this work way back at the beginning of the year with our first step – moving the Compose specification into a community run project. Then in July we announced how we were working together with AWS to make it easier to deploy Compose Applications to ECS using the Docker command line. As of today all Docker Desktop users will now have the stable ECS experience available to them, allowing developers to use docker compose commands with an ECS context to run their containers against ECS.

As part of this we want to thank the AWS team who have helped us make this happen: Carmen Puccio, David Killmon, Sravan Rengarajan, Uttara Sridhar, Massimo Re Ferre, Jonah Jones and David Duffey.

Getting started with Docker Compose & ECS

As an existing ECS user or a new starter all you will need to do is update to the latest Docker Desktop Community version (2.5.0.1 or greater) store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here Continue reading

Apple Silicon M1 Chips and Docker

Revealed at Apple’s ‘One More Thing’ event on Nov 10th, Docker was excited to see new Macs feature Apple silicon and their M1 chip. At Docker we have been looking at the new hypervisor features and support that are required for Mac to continue to delight our millions of customers. We saw the first spotlight of these efforts at Apple WWDC in June, when Apple highlighted Docker Desktop on stage. Our goal at Docker is to provide the same great experience on the new Macs as we do today for our millions of users on Docker Desktop for Mac, and to make this transition as seamless as possible.

Building the right experience for our customers means getting quite a few things right before we push a release. Although Apple has released Rosetta 2 to help move applications over to the new M1 chips, this does not get us all the way with Docker Desktop. Under the hood of Docker Desktop, we run a virtual machine, to achieve this on Apple’s new hardware we need to move onto Apple’s new hypervisor framework. We also need to do all the plumbing that provides the core experience of Docker Continue reading

Compose CLI ACI Integration Now Available

Today we are pleased to announce that we have reached a major milestone, reaching GA and our V1 of both the Compose CLI and the ACI integration.

In May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). We are happy to let you know that all users of Docker Desktop now have the ACI experience available to them by default, allowing them to easily use existing Docker commands to deploy and manage containers running in ACI.

As part of this I want to also call out a thank you to the MSFT team who have worked with us to make this all happen! That is a big thank you to Mike Morton, Karol Zadora-Przylecki, Brandon Waterloo, MacKenzie Olson, and Paul Yuknewicz.

Getting started with Docker and ACI

As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.5.0.0 or later), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you Continue reading

Pro and Team Subscriptions Embrace Docker Desktop

About a month ago we talked about how we planned to make Docker Desktop more first class as part of our Pro and Team subscriptions. Today we are pleased to announce that with the latest release of Docker Desktop we are launching support for Docker Desktop for Pro and Team users. This means that customers on Pro plans or team members on Team plans will be able to get support outside of the community support in our Github repository, this will include installation support, issues in running Desktop and of course the existing support for Docker Hub.

Along with this, we have our first Pro feature available in Docker Desktop! For Pro and Team users who have scanning enabled in Docker Hub, you will be able to see your scan results directly in the Docker Dashboard.

This is the first step in releasing unique features for Pro and Team users on Docker Desktop.

Along with this we are pleased to announce that in Docker Desktop 2.5 we have the GA release of the docker scan CLI powered by Snyk! To find out more about scanning images locally have a read of Marina’s blog post.

For customers Continue reading

Setting Up Cloud Deployments Using Docker, Azure and Github Actions

A few weeks ago I shared a blog about how to use GitHub Actions with Docker, prior to that Guillaume has also shared his blog post on using Docker and ACI. I thought I would bring these two together to look at a single flow to go from your code in GitHub all the way through to deploying on ACI using our new Docker to ACI experience!

To start, let’s remember where we were with our last Github action. Last time we got to a point where our builds to master would be re-built and pushed to Docker Hub (and we used some caching to speed these up).

name: CI to Docker Hub
 
on:
 push:
   tags:
     - "v*.*.*"
 
jobs:
 
 build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   steps:
     -
       name: Checkout
       uses: actions/checkout@v2
     -      
       name: Set up Docker Buildx
       id: buildx
       uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1
     -    
       name: Cache Docker layers
       uses: actions/cache@v2
       with:
         path: /tmp/.buildx-cache
         key: ${{ runner.os }}-buildx-${{ github.sha }}
         restore-keys: |
           ${{ runner.os }}-buildx-
     -
       uses: docker/login-action@v1
       with:
         username: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_USERNAME }}
         password: ${{ secrets.DOCKER_PASSWORD }}
     -
       name: Build and push
       id: docker_build
       uses: docker/build-push-action@v2
       with:
         context: ./
         file: ./Dockerfile
         builder: ${{ steps.buildx.outputs.name  Continue reading

Docker V2 Github Action is Now GA

Docker is happy to announce the GA of our V2 Github Action. We’ve been working with @crazy-max over the last few months along with getting feedback from the wider community on how we can improve our existing Github Action. We have now moved from our single action to a clearer division and advanced set of options that not only allow you to just build & push but also support features like multiple architectures and build cache.

The big change with the advent of our V2 action is also the expansion of the number of actions that Docker is providing on Github. This more modular approach and the power of Github Actions has allowed us to make the minimal UX changes to the original action and add a lot more functionality.

We still have our more meta build/push action which does not actually require all of these preconfiguration steps and can still be used to deliver the same workflow we had with the previous workflow! To Upgrade the only changes are that we have split out the login to a new step and also now have a step to setup our builder.

  -
        name: Setup Docker Buildx
        uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1

This Continue reading

The Docker Dashboard Welcomes Hub and Local Images

Last year we released the Docker Dashboard as part of Docker Desktop, today we are excited to announce we are releasing the next piece of the dashboard to our community customers with a new Images UI. We have expanded the existing UI for your local machine with the ability to interact with your Docker images on Docker Hub and locally. This allows you to: display your local images, manage them (run, inspect, delete) through an intuitive UI without using the CLI. And for you images in Hub you can now view you repos or your teams repos and pull images directly from the UI.

To get started, Download the latest Docker Desktop release and load up the dashboard (we are also excited that we have given the dashboard an icon)

You will be able to see that we have also added a new sidebar to navigate between the two areas and we are planning to add new sections in here soon. To find out more about what’s coming or to give feedback on what you would like to see check out our public roadmap.

Let’s jump in and have a look at what we can do…

From Continue reading

Docker Github Actions

In our first post in our series on CI/CD we went over some of the high level best practices for using Docker. Today we are going to go a bit deeper and look at Github actions.

We have just released a V2 of our GitHub Action to make using the Cache easier as well! We also want to call out a huge THANK YOU to @crazy-max (Kevin :D) for the of work he put into the V2 of the action, we could not have done this without him!

Right now let’s have a look at what we can do!

To start we will need to get a project setup, I am going to use one of my existing simple Docker projects to test this out:

The first thing I need to do is to ensure that I will be able to access Docker Hub from any workflow I create, to do this I will need to add my DockerID and a Personal Access Token (PAT) as secrets into GitHub. I can get a PAT by going to https://hub.docker.com/settings/security and clicking ‘new access token’, in this instance I will call my token ‘whaleCI’

I can then Continue reading

Best practices for using Docker Hub for CI/CD

According to the 2020 Jetbrains developer survey 44% of developers are now using some form of continuous integration and deployment with Docker Containers. We know a ton of developers have got this setup using Docker Hub as their container registry for part of their workflow so we decided to dig out the best practices for doing this and provide some guidance for how to get started. To support this we will be publishing a series of blog posts over the next few weeks to answer the common questions we see with the top CI providers.

We have also heard feedback that given the changes Docker introduced relating to network egress and the number of pulls for free users, that there are questions around the best way to use Docker Hub as part of CI/CD workflows without hitting these limits. This blog post covers best practices that improve your experience and uses a sensible consumption of Docker Hub which will mitigate the risk of hitting these limits and how to increase the limits depending on your use case.

To get started, one of the most important things when working with Docker and really any CI/CD is to work out when Continue reading

Check out the Azure CLI experience now available in Desktop Stable

Back in May we announced the partnership between Docker and Microsoft to make it easier to deploy containerized applications from the Desktop to the cloud with Azure Container Instances (ACI). Then in June we were able to share the first version of this as part of a Desktop Edge release, this allowed users to use existing Docker CLI commands straight against ACI making getting started running containers in the cloud simpler than ever.

We are now pleased to announce that the Docker and ACI integration has moved into Docker Desktop stable 2.3.0.5 giving all Desktop users access to the simplest way to get containers running in the cloud.

Getting started

As a new starter, to get going all you will need to do is upgrade your existing Docker Desktop to the latest stable version (2.3.0.5), store your image on Docker Hub so you can deploy it (you can get started with Hub here) and then lastly you will need to create an ACI context to deploy it to. For a simple example of getting started with ACI you can see our initial blog post on the edge experience.

More CLI commands

We Continue reading

Docker Desktop & WSL 2 – Backport Update

While we have continued to make improvements to our Windows experience on Docker Desktop for users of HyperV, we are excited to see that M icrosoft has announced the backport of WSL 2 to Windows version 1903 and 1909. This means that as of today, Docker Desktop Edge users will be able to use Docker Desktop with WSL 2 rather than our legacy HyperV based backend. This is available not only for Windows Pro and Windows Enterprise, but also for Windows Home users. This is the first time that Docker has been available on Windows Home versions 1903 and 1909!

This means that these developers will be able to take advantage of WSL 2 and Docker’s integration, allowing developers to store their code within their WSL 2 distro and run the Docker CLI from within this distro. This removes the need to access files stored on the Windows host and provides significant performance improvements for users.

To find out more about using Docker Desktop with WSL 2, check out Simon’s full tips and tricks article. If you want to learn more about how Docker developed the WSL 2 backend you can have a look through our history of the integration Continue reading

Deploying WordPress to the Cloud

I was curious the other day how hard it would be to actually set up my own blog or rather I was more interested in how easy it is now to do this with containers. There are plenty of platforms that host blogs for you but is it really now as easy to just run one yourself?

In order to get started, you can sign up for a Docker ID, or use your existing Docker ID to download the latest version of Docker Desktop Edge which includes the new Compose on ECS experience.

Start with the local experience

To start I setup a local WordPress instance on my machine, grabbing a Compose file example from the awesome-compose repo.

Initially I had a go at running this locally on with Docker Compose:

$ docker-compose up -d

Then I can get the list of running containers:

$ docker-compose ps
           Name                          Command               State          Ports
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
deploywptocloud_db_1          docker-entrypoint.sh --def ...   Up      3306/tcp, 33060/tcp
deploywptocloud_wordpress_1   docker-entrypoint.sh apach ...   Up      0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp

And then lastly I had a look to see that this was running correctly:

Deploy to the Cloud

Great! Now I needed to look at the contents of the Compose file Continue reading

Running a container in Microsoft Azure Container Instances (ACI) with Docker Desktop Edge

Earlier this month Docker announced our partnership with Microsoft to shorten the developer commute between the desktop and running containers in the cloud. We are excited to announce the first release of the new Docker Azure Container Instances (ACI) experience today and wanted to give you an overview of how you can get started using it.

The new Docker and Microsoft ACI experience allows developers to easily move between working locally and in the Cloud with ACI; using the same Docker CLI experience used today! We have done this by expanding the existing docker context command to now support ACI as a new backend. We worked with Microsoft to target ACI as we felt its performance and ‘zero cost when nothing is running’ made it a great place to jump into running containers in the cloud.

ACI is a Microsoft serverless container solution for running a single Docker container or a service composed of a group of multiple containers defined with a Docker Compose file. Developers can run their containers in the cloud without needing to set up any infrastructure and take advantage of features such as mounting Azure Storage and GitHub repositories as volumes. For production cases, you can Continue reading

Creating the best Linux Development experience on Windows & WSL 2

We are really excited to have had Docker Desktop be featured in a breakout session titled “The Journey to One .NET” at MSFT Build by @Scott Hanselman with WSL 2. Earlier in the his keynote, we learned about the great new enhancements for GPU support for WSL 2 and we want to hear from our community about your interest in adding this functionality to Docker Desktop. If you are eager to see GPU support come to Docker Desktop, please let us know by voting up our roadmap item and feel free to raise any new requests here as well.

With this announcement, the launch of the Windows 2004 release imminently and Docker Desktop v2.3.02 reaching WSL2 GA , we thought this would be a good time to reflect on how we got to where we are today with WSL 2.

April 2019

Casting our minds back to 2019 (a very different time!), we first discussed WSL 2 with Microsoft in April. We were excited to get started and wanted to find a way to get a build as soon as possible.

May 2019

It turned out the easiest way to do this was to collect a laptop Continue reading

Announcing the Compose Specification

Docker is pleased to announce that we have created a new open community to develop the Compose Specification. This new community will be run with open governance with input from all interested parties allowing us together to create a new standard for defining multi-container apps that can be run from the desktop to the cloud.

Docker is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and others in the open source community to extend the Compose Specification to more flexibly support cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) in addition to the existing Compose platforms. Opening the specification will allow innovation to flourish and deliver more choices to developers, accelerating how development teams build and ship applications.

Currently used by millions of developers and with over 650,000 Compose files on GitHub, Compose has been widely embraced by developers because it is a simple cloud and platform-agnostic way of defining multi-container based applications. Compose dramatically simplifies the code to cloud process and toolchain for developers by allowing them to define a complex stack in a single file and run it with a single command. This eliminates the need to build and start every container manually, saving development Continue reading

Join our new Docker Desktop Developer Preview Program!

Docker Desktop is getting ready to celebrate its fourth birthday in June this year. We have come a long way from our first version and have big plans of what we would like to do next. As part of our future plans we are going to be kicking off a new early access program for Docker Desktop called Docker Desktop Developer Preview and we need your help!

What is this Program about and what are the benefits?

This program is for a small number of heavy Docker Desktop users who want to interact with the Docker team and impact the future of Docker Desktop for millions of users around the world.

As a member of this group we will be working with you to look at and experiment with our new features. You will get direct access to the people who are building Docker Desktop everyday. You will meet with our engineering team, product manager and community leads, to share your feedback, tell us what is working in our new features and how we could improve, and also help us really dig in when something doesn’t work quite right.

On top of that, you will have a chance to Continue reading

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