Designing Your First App in Kubernetes, Part 1: Getting Started
Kubernetes: Always Powerful, Occasionally Unwieldy
Kubernetes’s gravity as the container orchestrator of choice continues to grow, and for good reason: It has the broadest capabilities of any container orchestrator available today. But all that power comes with a price; jumping into the cockpit of a state-of-the-art jet puts a lot of power under you, but how to actually fly the thing is not obvious.
Kubernetes’ complexity is overwhelming for a lot of people jumping in for the first time. In this blog series, I’m going to walk you through the basics of architecting an application for Kubernetes, with a tactical focus on the actual Kubernetes objects you’re going to need. I’m not, however, going to spend much time reviewing 12-factor design principles and microservice architecture; there are some excellent ideas in those sort of strategic discussions with which anyone designing an application should be familiar, but here on the Docker Training Team I like to keep the focus on concrete, hands-on-keyboard implementation as much as possible.
Furthermore, while my focus is on application architecture, I would strongly encourage devops engineers and developers building to Kubernetes to follow along, in addition to readers in application architecture Continue reading
Docker + Arm Virtual Meetup Recap: Building Multi-arch Apps with Buildx
Docker support for cross-platform applications is better than ever. At this month’s Docker Virtual Meetup, we featured Docker Architect Elton Stoneman showing how to build and run truly cross-platform apps using Docker’s buildx functionality.
With Docker Desktop, you can now describe all the compilation and packaging steps for your app in a single Dockerfile, and use it to build an image that will run on Linux, Windows, Intel and Arm – 32-bit and 64-bit. In the video, Elton covers the Docker runtime and its understanding of OS and CPU architecture, together with the concept of multi-architecture images and manifests.
The key takeaways from the meetup on using buildx:
- Everything should be multi-platform
- Always use multi-stage Dockerfiles
- buildx is experimental but solid (based on BuildKit)
- Alternatively use docker manifest — also experimental
Not a Docker Desktop user? Jason Andrews, a Solutions Director at Arm, posted this great article on how to setup buildx using Docker Community Engine on Linux.
Check out the full meetup on Docker’s YouTube Channel:
You can also access the demo repo here. The sample code for this meetup is from Elton’s latest book, Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches, an accessible task-focused Continue reading
New in Docker Hub: Personal Access Tokens
On the heels of our recent update on image tag details, the Docker Hub team is excited to share the availability of personal access tokens (PATs) as an alternative way to authenticate into Docker Hub.
Already available as part of Docker Trusted Registry, personal access tokens can now be used as a substitute for your password in Docker Hub, especially for integrating your Hub account with other tools. You’ll be able to leverage these tokens for authenticating your Hub account from the Docker CLI – either from Docker Desktop or Docker Engine:
docker login --username <username>
When you’re prompted for a password, enter your token instead.
The advantage of using tokens is the ability to create and manage multiple tokens at once so you can generate different tokens for each integration – and revoke them independently at any time.
Create and Manage Personal Access Tokens in Docker Hub
Personal access tokens are created and managed in your Account Settings.
From here, you can:
- Create new access tokens
- Modify existing tokens
- Delete access tokens
Note that the actual token is only shown once, at the time Continue reading
How Wiley Education Services Empowers Students with Docker Enterprise
We sat down recently with our customer, Wiley Education Services, to find out how Docker Enterprise helps them connect with and empower higher education students. Wiley Education Services (WES) is a division of Wiley Publishing that delivers online services to over 60 higher education institutions.
We spoke with Blaine Helmick, Senior Manager of Systems Engineering about innovation and technology in education. Read on to learn more about Wiley, or watch the short video interview with Blaine:
On Wiley’s Mission…
Our mission at Wiley Education Services is empowering people, to connect people to their futures. We serve over 60 higher education partners around the world, and our role is to connect you to our higher education partners when you’re looking for a degree and you’re frankly looking to change your life.
On the Innovation at a 200 Year Old Company…
Wiley has been around for over 200 years. One of the really amazing things about being in an organization that’s been around that long is that you have to have a culture of innovation at your core.
Technology like Docker has really empowered our business because it allows us to innovate, and it allows us to experiment. That’s critical because Continue reading
How InterSystems Builds an Enterprise Database at Scale with Docker Enterprise
We sat down recently with InterSystems, our partner and customer, to talk about how they deliver an enterprise database at scale to their customers. InterSystems’s software powers mission-critical applications at hospitals, banks, government agencies and other organizations.
We spoke with Joe Carroll, Product Specialist, and Todd Winey, Director of Partner Programs at InterSystems about how containerization and Docker are helping transform their business.
Here’s what they told us. You can also catch the highlights in this 2 minute video:
On InterSystems and Enterprise Databases…
Joe Carroll: InterSystems is a 41 year old database and data platform company. We’ve been in data storage for a very long time and our customers tend to be traditional enterprises — healthcare, finance, shipping and logistics as well as government agencies. Anywhere that there’s mission critical data we tend to be around. Our customers have really important systems that impact people’s lives, and the mission critical nature of that data characterizes who our customers are and who we are.
On Digital Transformation in Established Industries…
Todd Winey: Many of those organizations and industries have been traditionally seen as laggards in terms of their technology adoption in the past, so the speed with which they’re moving Continue reading
Powering Docker App: Next Steps for Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB)
Last year at DockerCon and Microsoft Connect, we announced the Cloud Native Application Bundle (CNAB) specification in partnership with Microsoft, HashiCorp, and Bitnami. Since then the CNAB community has grown to include Pivotal, Intel, DataDog, and others, and we are all happy to announce that the CNAB core specification has reached 1.0.
We are also announcing the formation of the CNAB project under the Joint Development Foundation, a part of the Linux Foundation that’s chartered with driving adoption of open source and standards. The CNAB specification is available at cnab.io. Docker is working hard with our partners and friends in the open source community to improve software development and operations for everyone.
Docker’s Implementation of CNAB — Docker App
Docker was one of the first to implement the CNAB specification with Docker App, our reference implementation available on GitHub. Docker App can be used to both build CNAB bundles for Docker Compose (which can then be used with any other CNAB client), and also to install, upgrade, and uninstall any other CNAB bundle.
It also forms the underpinnings of application templates in Docker Desktop Enterprise. With Docker App, we are making CNAB-compliant applications as easy to use Continue reading
Introducing Docker Hub’s New & Improved Tag User Experience
One of Docker’s core missions is delivering choice and flexibility across different application languages and frameworks, operating systems, and infrastructure. When it comes to modern applications, the choice of infrastructure is not just whether the application is run on-premises, on virtual machines or bare metal, or in the cloud. It can also be a choice of which architecture – x86, Arm, or GPU.
Today, we’re happy to share some updates in Docker Hub that make it easier to access multi-architecture images and scanning results through the Tag UX.
Navigating to Image Tags
In this example, we’re looking at a listing for a Docker Official Image that supports x86, PowerPC and IBMz as listed in the labels. When you land on the image page on Docker Hub, you can quickly identify if an image supports multiple architectures in the labels underneath the image name. For further details, you can click on ‘Tags’:
In this section, you can now view the different architectures separately to easily identify the right image for the architecture you need, complete with image size and operating system information:
If you click on the digest for a particular architecture, you will now also be able to Continue reading
Top 12 Questions from the Docker Enterprise 3.0 Webinar Series
Earlier in August, we hosted a series of virtual events to introduce Docker Enterprise 3.0. Thousands of you registered and joined us, and many of you asked great questions. This blog contains the top questions and answers from the event series.
Docker Enterprise in the Cloud, On-Prem, with Kubernetes
Q: Can Docker Enterprise be used on AWS and other cloud providers?
A: Yes! Docker Enterprise, including the Docker Universal Control Plane (UCP) and Docker Trusted Registry (DTR), can be deployed to any of the leading cloud environments, including AWS, Azure and GCP. With Docker Enterprise 3.0, we also launched the Docker Cluster CLI plugin for use with Docker Certified Infrastructure. The plugin (now supporting AWS and Azure) allows for simple installation and upgrading of Docker Enterprise on selected cloud providers.
Q: Is Docker Cluster only available in the public cloud, or is it possible to add local machines or VMs?
A: Additional support for VMware vSphere environments is coming shortly. If you have other platforms that need to be supported, please engage with your account team to provide that feedback!
Q: Does Docker Kubernetes Service (DKS) work with both on-premises and other Kubernetes environments such as EKS, AKS, Continue reading
Why you Have to Fail Fearlessly to Succeed: The Citizens Bank Story of Innovation with Docker
We had the chance recently to sit down with the Citizens Bank mortgage division and ask them how they’ve incorporated innovation into a regulated and traditional business that is still very much paper-based.
The most important lesson they’ve learned: you have to be willing to “fail fearlessly,” but to do that, you also have to minimize the consequences and cost of failure so you can constantly try new ideas. With Docker Enterprise, the team has been able to take ideas from concept to production in as little as a day.
Here’s what they told us. You can also catch the highlights in this 2 minute video:
On focus:
Matt Rider, CIO Mortgage Division: Our focus is changing the mortgage technology experience at the front end with the borrower and on the back end for the loan officers and the processors. How do we bring those two together? How do we reduce the aggravation that comes with obtaining a mortgage?
On founding an “innovation team” . . .
Matt: When I came here I recognized that we were never going to achieve our vision if we kept doing things the same way. We wanted to reduce the aggravation that comes with obtaining a mortgage. Continue reading
5 Things That Happen When You Get Locked In to an Application Platform
The Consequences of Application Platform Lock-in
If you’ve worked in IT for a few years, you’ve seen it happen. You select an application framework, operating system, database platform, or other infrastructure because it meets the checklist, the price is right, or sometimes because of internal politics. You quickly discover that it doesn’t play well with other solutions or across platforms — except of course it’s “easy and seamless” when used with offerings from the same vendor.
But try telling your developers that they can’t use their favorite framework, development toolset, or have to use a specific operating system for everything they do. If developers feel like they don’t have flexibility, they quickly adopt their own tools, creating a second wave of shadow IT.
And it doesn’t just affect developers. IT operations and security get bogged down in managing multiple systems and software sprawl. The business suffers because efficiency and innovation lag when teams get caught up in fighting fires.
Below are 5 things that can go wrong when you get locked in to an infrastructure platform:
#1 Other Platforms Become Inaccessible
Will the platform you pick work with any combination of public and private clouds? Will you get cornered into Continue reading
Don’t Pick an Ops Platform Your Devs Won’t Use
In all of the excitement and buzz around Kubernetes, one important factor in the conversation that seems to be glossed over is how and where containerized applications are built. Going back to Docker’s roots, it was developers who were the first ones to adopt Docker containers. It solved their own local development issues and made it easier and faster to get applications out the door.
Fast forward 5 years, and developers are more important than ever. They build modern apps and modernize existing apps that are the backbone of organizations. If you’re in IT operations and selecting application platforms, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is making this decision in isolation, without development buy-in.
Avoiding Shadow IT, Round 2
In the early days of public cloud, developers started going around IT to get fast access to computing resources, creating the first round of “Shadow IT”. Today, most large enterprises have embraced cloud applications and infrastructure, and work collaboratively across application development and operations teams to serve their needs.
But there’s a risk we’ll invite the same thing to happen again by making a container platform decision that doesn’t involve your developers. Here are 3 reasons to Continue reading
Learn About Modern Apps with Docker at VMworld 2019
The Docker team will be on the show floor at VMworld the week of August 25. We’ll be talking about the state of modern application development, how to accelerate innovation efforts, and the role containerization and Docker play in powering these initiatives.
At VMworld, we’ll be talking about:
What’s New in Docker Enterprise 3.0
Docker Enterprise 3.0 shipped recently, making it the first and only desktop-to-cloud container platform in the market that lets you build and share any application and securely run them anywhere – from hybrid cloud to the edge. At VMworld, we’ll have demos that shows how Docker Enterprise 3.0 simplifies Kubernetes with the Docker Kubernetes Service (DKS) and enables companies to more easily build modern applications with Docker Desktop Enterprise and Docker Application.Accelerating Your Journey to the Cloud
Everyone is talking about moving workloads to the cloud to drive efficiencies and simplify ops, but many existing applications that power Continue readingDeveloping Docker-Powered Applications on Windows with WSL 2
This is a guest post from Docker Captain Antonis Kalipetis, a Senior Software Engineer at e-food — the leading online food delivery service in Greece. He is a Python lover and developer and helps teams embrace containers and improve their development workflow. He loves automating stuff and sharing knowledge around all things containers, DevOps and developer workflows. You can follow him on Twitter @akalipetis. WSL 2 (or Windows Subsystem for Linux version 2) is Microsoft’s second take on shipping a Linux Kernel with Windows. The first version was awesome as it translated Linux system calls to the equivalent Windows NT call in real time. The second version includes a full fledged virtual machine. It was only natural that Docker would embrace this change and ship a Docker Desktop for Windows version that runs on WSL 2 (WSL 1 had issues running the Docker daemon). This is still a Technical Preview, but after using it for a couple of days, I’ve completely switched my local development to take advantage of it and I’m pretty happy with it. In this blog, I’ll show you an example of how to develop Docker-powered applications using the Docker Desktop WSL 2 Tech Preview.Continue reading
Deploying Dockerized .NET Apps Without Being a DevOps Guru
This is a guest post by Julie Lerman. She is a Docker Captain, published author, Microsoft Regional Director and a long-time Microsoft MVP who now counts her years as a coder in decades. She makes her living as a coach and consultant to software teams around the world. You can follow Julie on her blog at thedatafarm.com/blog, or on Twitter at @julielerman.
See Docker Enterprise 3.0 in Action in Our Upcoming Webinar Series
To showcase all of the capabilities of the platform and highlight what is new in this release, we invite you to join our 5-part webinar series to explore the technologies that make up Docker Enterprise 3.0. You’ll see several demos of the platform and gain a better understanding of how Docker can you help your organization deliver high-velocity innovation while providing you the choice and security you need. We designed the webinar both for those new to containers and Kubernetes, as well as those who are just here to learn more about what’s new. We’re excited to share what we’ve been working on.
Here’s an overview of what we’ll be covering in each session.
Part 1: Content Management
Tuesday, August 13, 2019 @ 11am PDT / 2pm EDTThis webinar will cover the Continue reading
Docker Release Party Recap
We Celebrated the Launch of Docker Enterprise 3.0 and Docker 19.03 Last Week
Last week, Docker Captain Bret Fisher hosted a 3-day Release Party for Docker 19.03 and Docker Enterprise 3.0. Captains and the Docker team demonstrated some of their favorite new features and answered live audience questions. Here are the highlights (You can check out the full release party here).Docker Desktop Enterprise
To kick things off, Docker Product Manager Ben De St Paer-Gotch shared Docker Desktop Enterprise. Docker Desktop Enterprise ships with the Enterprise Engine and includes a number of features that makes enterprise development easier and more productive. For example, version packs allow developers to switch between Docker Engine versions and Kubernetes versions, all from the desktop.For admins, Docker Desktop Enterprise includes the ability to lock down the settings of Docker Desktop, so developers’ machines stay aligned with corporate requirements. Ben also demonstrated Docker Application Designer, a feature that allows users to create new Docker applications by using a library of templates, making it easier for developers in the enterprise to get updated app templates – or “gold standard” versions like the right environment variable settings, custom code, custom editor settings, Continue reading
5 Things to Try with Docker Desktop WSL 2 Tech Preview
As a refresher, this preview makes use of the new Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) version that Microsoft recently made available on Windows insider fast ring. It has allowed us to provide improvements to file system sharing, boot time and access to some new features for Docker Desktop users.
To do this we have changed quite a bit about how we interact with the operating system compared to Docker Desktop on Windows today:
Want to give it a go?
- Get setup on a Windows machine on the latest Windows Insider build. The first step for this is heading over to the Microsoft and getting set up as a Windows Insider: https://insider.windows.com/en-gb/getting-started/
- You’ll need to install the latest release branch (at least build version 18932) and you will then want to enable the WSL 2 feature in Windows: https://docs.microsoft. Continue reading
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.
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
Top 4 Tactics To Keep Node.js Rockin’ in Docker
This is a guest post from Docker Captain Bret Fisher, a long time DevOps sysadmin and speaker who teaches container skills with his popular Docker Mastery courses including Docker Mastery for Node.js, weekly YouTube Live shows, and consults to companies adopting Docker. Join Bret for an online meetup on August 28th, where he’ll give demos and Q&A on Node.js and Docker topics.
There’s a ton of info out there on using Node.js with Docker, but so much of it is years out of date, and I’m here to help you optimize your setups for Node.js 10+ and Docker 18.09+. If you’d rather watch my DockerCon 2019 talk that covers these topics and more, check it out on YouTube.
Let’s go through 4 steps Continue reading
Accelerate Application Delivery with Application Templates in Docker Desktop Enterprise
Application Templates enable developers to build modern applications using a library of predefined and organization-approved application and service templates, without requiring prior knowledge of Docker commands. By providing re-usable “scaffolding” for developing modern container-based applications, Application Templates accelerate developer onboarding and improve productivity.
The Application Templates themselves include many of the discrete components required for developing a new application, including the Dockerfile, custom base images, common compose service YAML, and application parameters (external ports and upstream image versions). They can even include boilerplate code and code editor configs.
