Top 5 blogs of 2017: Exciting new things for Docker with Windows Server 1709

We’ve rounded up the most-read Docker blogs of 2017. Topping our list at number two is, Exciting new things for Docker with Windows Server 1709.

What a difference a year makes… last September, Microsoft and Docker launched Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), a Containers-as-a-Service platform for IT that manages and secures diverse applications across disparate infrastructures, for Windows Server 2016. Since then we’ve continued to work together and Windows Server 1709 contains several enhancements for Docker customers.

Docker Enterprise Edition Preview

To experiment with the new Docker and Windows features, a preview build of Docker is required. Here’s how to install it on Windows Server 1709 (this will also work on Insider builds):

Install-Module DockerProvider
Install-Package Docker -ProviderName DockerProvider -RequiredVersion preview

To run Docker Windows containers in production on any Windows Server version, please stick to Docker EE 17.06.

Docker Linux Containers on Windows

A key focus of Windows Server version 1709 is support for Linux containers on Windows. We’ve already blogged about how we’re supporting Linux containers on Windows with the LinuxKit project.

To try Linux Containers on Windows Server 1709, install the preview Docker package and enable the feature. The preview Docker EE package includes a full LinuxKit Continue reading

Top 5 Blogs of 2017 – Build and run your first Docker Windows Server container

As 2017 comes to a close, we looked back at the top five blogs that were most popular with our readers. For those of you that have yet to set up your first Docker Windows container, we are kicking off the week with a blog that will help you get up and running on Windows containers.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016, and with it, Docker engine running containers natively on Windows. This blog post describes how to get setup to run Docker Windows Containers on Windows 10 or using a Windows Server 2016 VM. Check out the companion blog posts on the technical improvements that have made Docker containers on Windows possible and the post announcing the Docker Inc. and Microsoft partnership.

Before getting started, It’s important to understand that Windows Containers run Windows executables compiled for the Windows Server kernel and userland (either windowsservercore or nanoserver). To build and run Windows containers, a Windows system with container support is required.

Windows 10 with Anniversary Update

For developers, Windows 10 is a great place to run Docker Windows containers and containerization support was added to the the Windows 10 kernel with the Anniversary Continue reading

Docker Enterprise Edition Fuels Channel Success in 2017

The past year has proven to be one of rapid customer growth and traction in the enterprise. The channel is a fundamental part of our achievements to date and we are grateful for all of the dedicated partners involved in taking container technology mainstream. We now have hundreds of the largest enterprises as customers and we look forward to driving even greater adoption in the coming year alongside our partners.

With 2017 coming to an end, here’s a quick look back at channel achievements from this past year:

• Driving partner enablement and success: Our partners have built highly-successful and profitable business models around Docker Enterprise Edition and accelerated their customers’ digital transformation initiatives in doing so. The Docker Partner Program and our recently updated Partner Portal provide partners with the resources, training and the joint selling success stories needed to identify, fulfill and capitalize on strategic enterprise opportunities to build a Docker Practice.
• Setting our partners up to demonstrate immediate ROI: The Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) program represents a fast and easy way for partners to get customers up and running with Docker. The value for partners: MTA engagements are yielding 10X in Services and 7X in Continue reading

Top 5 Docker Customer Success Stories of 2017

The holidays are a time of joy, gratitude and reflection. As we look back on the year, we’re celebrating you, our amazing customers! You are the ones that make the Docker community special and inspire us to innovate. We appreciate the business and are grateful for the opportunity! With that we’d like to put the spotlight on the top 5 Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) customer stories of 2017.

Docker Enterprise Edition Lights a New Spark of Innovation within MetLife

MetLife, the global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs, will be celebrating it’s 150th birthday next year. To stay ahead of the competition, MetLife realizes it must be agile to more rapidly respond to changing market requirements. During the Day 2 General Session at DockerCon 2017, MetLife shared how they’re inspiring new innovation in their organization with Docker EE. MetLife also took part in the Docker MTA program designed to help customers bring portability, security, and efficiency to their traditional applications while saving on their total cost of ownership (TCO). Learn more about the Docker MTA program at Metlife in this video.

Visa Inc. Gains Speed and Operational Efficiency with Docker Enterprise Edition

In the keynote on Day Continue reading

Putting Docker Enterprise Edition on the Map with Kadaster and Capgemini

 As a government organization for the Netherlands, Kadaster is responsible for collecting and registering property and land rights, ships, aircraft and telecom networks. An important service for its citizens, registry information is available predominantly through online web services.

Beginning in 2011, Kadaster created a vision for their next generation technology platform which included a combination of SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS services. Today, Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) is an essential part of this solution. At DockerCon Europe, Rick Peters from CapGemini discussed how they worked with Kadaster to deliver an agile application platform that now runs some of the most demanding workloads for the Dutch organization.

You can watch the talk here: 

Growth of Private Cloud Fuels Hunger for New Technologies

Beginning in 2012, Kadaster created one of the most successful private clouds in the Netherlands. Starting out as 300 virtual machines, the team did not think they would surpass 750 virtual machines, but blew well past that figure in just two years.

That rapid expansion was fueled by the easier self-service delivery model and the ability deploy apps more regularly and faster. Initially focused as a Java runtime platform powered by virtualization, the platform objectives shifted over Continue reading

DockerCon 2018 San Francisco CFP is Open

Deadline: January 18th at 11:59 PST

The DockerCon San Francisco 2018 Call for Proposals is open! From beginners to experts, the Docker and Moby community come to DockerCon to learn, share and contribute. If you have Docker story to share, submit your talk today. The deadline for submissions is January 18th, 2018 at 11:59 PST.

Submit a talk

IT Pros How-tos (new)

SysAdmins, what is your container story? How did you operationalize Docker in your organization and what changes did it bring about? Tell us about a day or week in your life, and be sure to share your learnings, insights, recommendations and future plans!

Containers in Production – Customer Stories

Are you a Docker EE customer with production implementation advice and learnings to share? Can you share your technology stack, architecture decisions and trade offs, and your ROI? When attendees leave your session, they should understand how to apply your take-aways to their use case.

Great examples from previous events: Beyond Chicken Nuggets: 1 year and 1,000 Containers Later at ADP by James Ford and Taking Docker from Local to Production at Intuit by JanJaap Lahpor and Harish Jayakumar

Cool Apps

What are you building with the Continue reading

A tour of containerd 1.0

We have done a few talks in the past on different features of containerd, how it was designed, and some of the problems that we have fixed along the way. Containerd is used by Docker, Kubernetes CRI, and a few other projects but this is a post for people who may not know what containerd actually does within these platforms.  I would like to do more posts on the feature set and design of containerd in the future but for now, we will start with the basics.

I think the container ecosystem can be confusing at times. Especially with the terminology that we use. Whats this? A runtime. And this? A runtime…  containerd (pronounced “container-dee”) as the name implies, not contain nerd as some would like to troll me with, is a container daemon.  It was originally built as an integration point for OCI runtimes like runc but over the past six months it has added a lot of functionality to bring it up to par with the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes.

So what do you actually get using containerd?  You get push and pull functionality as well as image Continue reading

Simplifying the Management of Kubernetes with Docker Enterprise Edition

Back in October at DockerCon Europe, we announced that Docker will be delivering a  seamless and simplified integration of Kubernetes into the Docker platform. By integrating Kubernetes with Docker EE, we provide the choice to use Kubernetes and/or Docker Swarm for orchestration while maintaining the consistent developer to operator workflow users have come to expect from Docker. For users, this means they get an unmodified, conformant version of Kubernetes with the added value of the Docker platform including security, management, a familiar developer workflow and tooling, broad ecosystem compatibility and an adherence to industry standards including containerd and the OCI.

One of the biggest questions that we’ve been asked since we announced support for Kubernetes at  DockerCon EU –  what does this mean for an operations team that is already using Kubernetes to orchestrate containers within their enterprise? The answer is really fairly straightforward  –  Kubernetes teams using Docker EE will have the following:

• Full access to the Kube API and all Kubernetes constructs
• Native use of KubeCTL
• If you are developing in Kube YML, seamless deployment
• Ability to develop  in Docker with Compose and leverage your best practices around Kubernetes services

Docker Enterprise Edition with support for Kubernetes Continue reading

Announcing the General Availability of containerd 1.0, the industry-standard runtime used by millions of users

Today, we’re pleased to announce that containerd (pronounced Con-Tay-Ner-D), an industry-standard runtime for building container solutions, has reached its 1.0 milestone. containerd has already been deployed in millions of systems in production today, making it the most widely adopted runtime and an essential upstream component of the Docker platform.

Built to address the needs of modern container platforms like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes, containerd ensures users have a consistent dev to ops experience. From Docker’s initial announcement last year that it was spinning out its core runtime to its donation to the CNCF in March 2017, the containerd project has experienced significant growth and progress over the past 12 months. .

Within both the Docker and Kubernetes communities, there has been a significant uptick in contributions from independents and CNCF member companies alike including Docker, Google, NTT, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, ZTE, Huawei and ZJU. Similarly, the maintainers have been working to add key functionality to containerd.The initial containerd donation provided everything users need to ensure a seamless container experience including methods for:

• transferring container images,
• container execution and supervision,
• low-level local storage and network interfaces and
• the ability to work on both Linux, Windows and other platforms. Continue reading

The Journey to 150,000 Containers at PayPal

PayPal is committed to democratizing financial services and empowering people and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. Their open digital payments platform gives 218 million active account holders the confidence to connect and transact in new and powerful ways. To achieve this, PayPal has built a global presence that must be highly available to all its users: if PayPal is down, the effects ripple down to many of their small business customers, who rely on PayPal as their sole payment processing solution.

PayPal turned to Docker Enterprise Edition  to help them achieve new operational efficiencies, including a 50% increase in the speed of their build-test-deploy cycles. At the same time, they increased application availability through Docker’s dynamic placement capabilities and infrastructure independence; and they improved security by using Docker to automate and granularly control access to resources. On top of the operational benefits, PayPal’s use of Docker empowered developers to innovate and try new tools and frameworks that previously were difficult to introduce due to PayPal’s application and operational complexity.

Meghdoot Bhattacharya, Cloud Engineer at PayPal, shared the journey his team has helped PayPal undertake over the course of the past two years to introduce Docker in Continue reading

Introducing Docker Community Leaders – Formerly Known as Meetup Organizers

As we continue to grow, we’ve been thinking of ways to better serve the Docker community and give more visibility and recognition to the people who don’t just organize events, but who also teach, mentor and volunteer in their community.

What’s New?

• New name! These folks don’t just organize meetups, they are leaders, mentors, teachers, speakers, and volunteers in their local community.
• New mascot! About time right?  What better animal than the social dolphin to represent this amazing group! Our community leaders are pros at juggling several tasks and filling multiple roles at the same time.
• New Docker Community Events site! We’ve brought the community to docker.com making it easier than ever for you to find a local event! Learn more here. 

They spoke and we listened

At each DockerCon, we host a Summit for our Meetup Organizers to make connections, review best practices, and give feedback on what we’re doing well and what we can do better. In Austin, the group reviewed their program as a whole, and came to the decision that the title Meetup Organizer didn’t fully encompass the complete role they played in their local community. After the conference, we continued the conversation, and they Continue reading

How Docker Enterprise Edition Helps Open Doors at Assa Abloy

ASSA ABLOY is the world’s largest lock manufacturer with 47,000 employees worldwide and well-known brands like Yale, Sargent and Assa in their portfolio. The vision for ASSA ABLOY is to become the most innovative provider of door opening solutions through growth of electro-mechanical and digital entry solutions. With increasingly global operations to deal with as well, ASSA ABLOY recognized the opportunity to leverage public cloud, microservices and containers to fuel this digital transformation.

Jan Hedstrom, Cloud Infrastructure Architect in the Shared Technologies department at ASSA ABLOY, and Patrick Van Der Bleek, Solutions Engineer at Docker, presented at DockerCon Europe how ASSA ABLOY leveraged Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE)  as their central secure container management platform for their global hardware and software workflow . 

You can watch their entire talk here:

Journey from Docker CE to Docker EE

Some developers at ASSA ABLOY started using Docker for microservice development back in 2014, but it was uncoordinated with manual, scripted deployments of containers onto individual servers, inconsistent practices, no separation between teams, and without any image standards. Additionally, ASSA ABLOY knew that going to a public cloud like AWS would give them a “datacenter with superpowers”, but they were concerned about cloud Continue reading

Shifting Legacy WebLogic Apps to Docker Enterprise Edition for Improved Operations

Founded in 1792, Alm. Brand is a Danish insurance and banking company headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark and one of the oldest companies to have ever presented at any DockerCon. Sune Keller, an IT architect, and Loke Johannessen, Systems Specialist, rode their bikes to DockerCon Europe 2017 to demonstrate how they helped lift and shift their legacy WebLogic applications to Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE).  You can watch their entire talk here:

Seeking Operational Stability for Legacy Apps

Alm. Brand started working with Docker EE after hearing about it at DockerCon 2015 (known as Docker Datacenter back then). After successfully deploying the first set of new greenfield apps in their Docker EE environment, Alm. Brand wanted to tackle their existing WebLogic applications which were causing the operations team the biggest headaches. The team operated the WebLogic applications in a large cluster, all running on the same JVM. When an app crashed, it would often crash the entire JVM or hang the entire cluster, making it hard to identify which application was the root cause. The setup was also very brittle and slow as they could only deploy one app at a time to the cluster.

With the skills Continue reading

5 Reasons Why We’re Thankful for the Docker Community

As the weather gets colder and the days get shorter, we wanted to take some time to give a warm “thank you” to the Docker Community. With an ever-growing community and active community leaders, there’s a lot that Docker has to be thankful for this year! Here’s our top five:

Docker Community Gives Back

1. Docker Community Gives Back

Members of  the Docker and Moby  Community work with unbelievable amounts of dedication and passion on some of the best open source projects around. Their hardwork never goes unnoticed, and the Moby Project is better because of it’s community of awesome contributors.  

Interested in getting started on the Moby Project? Get more info on how you can get involved here.

2. Our Community Knows how to Take Action

With over 500 Community Leaders and locations in 81 countries, we’re continually impressed by the initiative our community takes in mentoring and teaching one another – even when you’re on different parts of the globe. We’ve seen you collaborate and create, and we couldn’t be more thankful for all of the impressive tips, tricks and knowledge that you share with us and the community.

3. All Roads Lead to Continue reading

Docker for Windows 17.11 with Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Experimental support for Microsoft’s Linux containers on Windows (LCOW) feature has been available for Windows Server 1709 via the Docker EE “Preview” release. The same functionality is now available for Windows 10 Fall Creators Update with the release of Docker for Windows 17.11. In fact, it’s been available since Docker for Windows 17.10. 

How to get it

Docker for Windows 17.11 is an Edge channel release. If your copy of Docker for Windows is set to the Edge or Nightly channel you will receive the update automatically. Users on the Stable channel will need to switch to Edge via the Setting dialog to receive the update.

Doesn’t Docker for Windows already run Linux containers?

That’s right. Docker for Windows can run Linux or Windows containers, with support for Linux containers via a Hyper-V Moby Linux VM (as of Docker for Windows 17.10 this VM is based on LinuxKit).

The setup for running Linux containers with LCOW is a lot simpler than the previous architecture where a Hyper-V Linux VM runs a Linux Docker daemon, along with all your containers. With LCOW, the Docker daemon runs as a Windows process (same as when running Docker Continue reading

Sharing is Caring: Docker Enterprise Edition Access Control

Multi-tenancy has many benefits in organizations. Clearly it increases hardware utilization but it also allows IT roles to specialize more, and provides better separation of concerns. This leads to more manageable infrastructure. Multi-tenancy is a challenging practice though, as it requires strict security control over resources without becoming too cumbersome for application deployment.

This blog post is about the Role-based Access Control (RBAC) enhancements introduced in Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) 17.06. These enhancements allow for much more granular control and also flexible policy modeling that is one giant building block of a multitenant container infrastructure. This post will help you  address questions like:

• How do I prevent different teams from viewing or interacting with each other’s applications when using shared infrastructure?
• How can I enforce scheduling on certain nodes in the cluster?
• How can I manage all the access policies so it’s clearly understandable who has access to what?

Docker EE Access Control is a policy-based model that uses access control lists called grants to dictate access between users and cluster resources. A grant is a rule that ties together who, can do which actions, against what resource.

As shown below, a grant is made Continue reading

Multi-arch All The Things

[This post was written by Phil Estes and Michael Friis.]

True multi-platform workload portability has long been the holy grail of enterprise computing. All kinds of virtualization strategies have been used over the years to approximate this dream to varying levels of acceptable performance or usability. On the one hand, virtual machines and hardware virtualization are flexible enough that you can mix and match operating systems (and even CPU architectures) on the same host—but they come with a lot of overhead. However, language-based virtual runtimes don’t have packaging formats that encapsulate all system-level app dependencies, and that makes them unsuitable for general-purpose deployment and configuration management.

Docker came along as a unique type of virtualization that only virtualizes the operating system for container processes. Docker uses existing Linux kernel features to offer isolation characteristics that are similar to what is available with virtual machines. The analogy of a “standard shipping container,” combined with these isolation primitives, caught developer interest immediately. With this new shipping metaphor came speed and agility that blew the doors off virtual machine size and speed constraints that impacted developer workflow, not to mention developer happiness! The containerization craze has grown like wildfire since then, but Continue reading

Swarm Orchestration in Docker Enterprise Edition

At DockerCon Europe, we announced that the next release of Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) would include Kubernetes integration. We’re really excited about bringing Kubernetes to our customer base and continuing to increase our involvement within the community. But it’s equally important for us to note that Swarm orchestration is not going away. Swarm forms an integral cluster management component of the Docker EE platform; in addition, Swarm will operate side-by-side with Kubernetes in a Docker EE cluster, allowing customers to select, based on their needs, the most suitable orchestration tool at application deployment time.

Here are just a few reasons that Swarm is integral to the Docker EE solution:

1. Support our existing customers and ecosystem integrations
2. Provide customers the flexibility in choice of orchestrators
3. Provide secure and highly available clustering architecture

Existing Customers and Ecosystem Integrations

Docker now has hundreds of Docker EE customers who have standardized on Swarm orchestration. In fact, at our Customer Summit during DockerCon, all of the customers stated that they intend to continue using Swarm even with the Kubernetes announcement. Having both orchestration options available is definitely a plus for some of these customers that have organizations within the company using both Swarm and Continue reading

Docker Enterprise Edition Certified as Kubernetes Conformant

Yesterday, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®) announced that Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) passed the Certified Kubernetes™ conformance program. Based on the upcoming release of Docker EE that was demonstrated onstage at DockerCon Europe, this certification guarantees that all Kubernetes APIs function as specified to deliver a consistent and portable Kubernetes experience within Docker EE.

In addition to a fully-conformant, unmodified  Kubernetes experience, users of Docker EE will also have access to the advanced capabilities of the Docker platform including simple and powerful clustering, a secure end-to-end supply chain, and validation to run on all major Linux distributions, Windows, IBM mainframe, and several leading public clouds. By integrating Kubernetes into Docker EE, we simplify and advance the management of Kubernetes for enterprise IT.  

Conformance Testing

Docker EE was certified against Kubernetes v1.8 by passing a test suite overseen by SIG Architecture. The test gives end users the confidence that Docker EE delivers a high level of common functionality to the main Kubernetes distribution and these results are validated by CNCF.

As a Certified Kubernetes platform, we are also promising to release new versions of Docker EE with Kubernetes to ensure that customers can take advantage of the rapid pace Continue reading

Integrating Docker EE Into Société Générale’s Existing Enterprise IT Systems

Société Générale is a 153-year old French multinational bank that believes technology and innovation are key to enriching the customer experience and advancing economic development. A few years ago, the bank started a project to define their next generation application platform that would help them get 80% of their applications running in the cloud by 2020. Société Générale chose Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker EE) to be the foundation of their application platform and began working with it 15 months ago. This year at DockerCon Europe, Stephan Dechoux, DevOps architect, and Thomas Boussardon, Middleware Specialist, shared their journey over this time integrating Docker Enterprise Edition [Docker EE] into Société Générale IT systems.

You can watch their breakout session here:

A New Platform For Today and Tomorrow

Société Générale has a diverse application portfolio that includes many different types of applications, including legacy monolithic apps, SOA, distributed apps and REST APIs. The bank is also a global organization with teams and data centers around the world. A primary goal  was to deliver a new application platform to improve time-to-market and lower costs, while accelerating innovation. Initially Société Générale considered off-the-shelf PaaS solutions, but realized that these were better suited for greenfield applications Continue reading