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LinuxKit as a Commodity for Building Linux Distributions

Guest post by Docker Captain Gianluca Arbezzano

Recently Corey Quinn from LastWeekInAWS wrote an article that made me think “Nobody Cares About the Operating System Anymore”. Please have a look at it! I like the idea that nobody cares about where their application runs. Developers only want them running.

A bit of context about Tinkerbell

I am one of the maintainers for the Tinkerbell project. A bare metal workflows engine that heavily relies on containers and Docker to get its work done. It tries to find an answer for a reasonable question: how do we manage rooms of pieces of hardware? More in practice, how can we bring an API on top of everybody’s data centers?

Containers are the abstraction we decided to use when running reusable code (that we call actions) in somebody else’s hardware. Mainly because distribution, packaging, and runtime are solved issues. Everyone knows how to build, push and run a container.

I think this scenario compares well with the story Corey highlighted. Operating systems are an established, well-known abstraction for the majority of the use cases.

The special operating system for bare metal provisioning

The lifecycle of a bare metal server can be summarised as follows:

1. Continue reading

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Write Maintainable Integration Tests with Docker

Testcontainer is an open source community focused on making integration tests easier across many languages. Gianluca Arbezzano is a Docker Captain, SRE at Influx Data and the maintainer of the Golang implementation of Testcontainer that uses the Docker API to expose a test-friendly library that you can use in your test cases. 

The popularity of microservices and the use of third-party services for non-business critical features has drastically increased the number of integrations that make up the modern application. These days, it is commonplace to use MySQL, Redis as a key value store, MongoDB, Postgress, and InfluxDB – and that is all just for the database – let alone the multiple services that make up other parts of the application.

All of these integration points require different layers of testing. Unit tests increase how fast you write code because you can mock all of your dependencies, set the expectation for your function and iterate until you get the desired transformation. But, we need more. We need to make sure that the integration with Redis, MongoDB or a microservice works as expected, not just that the mock works as we wrote it. Both are Continue reading