Security Release: Docker 1.8.3 and 1.6.2-CS7

AWS re:Invent re:cap

What a week. Some tech conferences I like, and others I love. Falling solidly in my "love" category, the Amazon team pulled off another great event with re:Invent 2015. Of course, the AWS product folks didn’t disappoint, either. (And neither did surprise re:Play party guest Zedd.)

We welcomed many hundreds of visitors to our booth during the three days. Over 200 shirts, many more Ansibulls, and every single sticker, luggage tag, and business card were gobbled up by excited Ansible users and Tower customers.

Perhaps the most entertaining part was to learn what people had to say:

No Bull. Just Swag.

We're over-the-moon excited to announce the Ansible online store is live. In response to all of the love you've shown us, we had to step up our swag game. The Ansible Store carries a variety of our best items, and we can't wait to see you showing off your Ansible pride. 

You can find your all-time favorites, like t-shirts, mugs and stickers. Plus, we've added a few exciting new items, like Ansible + Patagonia backpacks and onesies for our youngest fans.

For now we're only shipping throughout the United States while we get up and running. For our international friends, we'll expand shipment in the future. Stay tuned. 

Don't be surprised when you don't see our lovable Ansi-bull on the site. You'll need to attend a meetup or spot us at an event for one of those. 

So what are you waiting for? Start shopping and join the A team. 

DockerCon EU 2015: Six More Speakers Confirmed!

Webinar Q&A: Docker Overview

Feature Spotlight: System Tracking

During the second installment of our webinar series about Ansible Tower features, we highlighted system tracking, a functionality which was just added to Tower with our 2.2. release.

System Tracking was created to give administrators the necessary tools to audit and verify that machines are in compliance. Use the tool to see how a machine has changed over time, or compare machines in your cluster to see how they are different.

For example, you may need to determine whether a set of machines had a security patch applied, or determine when a patch was applied. The System Tracking tools can help you do that. They can also help you evaluate your infrastructure for compliance against specific requirements, and periodically examine machines for unexpected changes.

When you run a scan, you’ll be able to see packages, services, and Ansible facts side-by-side for comparison. All differences in Ansible facts are highlighted in red for easy reference.

You can also expand this function by writing your own Ansible module that gathers the custom facts you want to see. Simply implement a module that returns the “ansible_facts” key, as described in the Ansible documentation.

Our goal with system tracking was to empower you Continue reading

Your Docker Agenda for AWS re:Invent 2015

Your Docker Agenda for October

Ansible + AWS: Re-Inventing Cloud Automation

Amazon Web Services and Ansible together make a great pair. AWS is a popular cloud target for Ansible users, and the reasons are clear: Ansible offers built-in support for over 20 different AWS capabilities with 50 different easy-to-use and understand Ansible modules. And as always, from on-premise to cloud, you can automate 100% of your infrastructure without ever installing an agent.

The takeaway? If your IT organizations is serious about AWS, then it needs to be serious about Ansible automation.

Come visit Ansible in booth 439 at re:Invent 2015 to learn how customers are using the Ansible automation platform to re-invent how they’re managing their cloud applications. Whether you’re just dipping your toe into the cloud, or are already running a fully-automated devops-enabled environment, Ansible is the key to unlocking the full benefit of moving to the cloud.

Connect with our team at the show:

If you’re new to Ansible, this is your opportunity to hit us with whatever questions you have about how Continue reading

Docker Basics Webinar Q&A: Understanding Union Filesystems, Storage and Volumes

DockerCon EU 2015: 3rd Round of Black Belt Speakers

Four New Official Repos in Docker Hub: Gazebo, Rocket.chat, Joomla and Redmine

Your Ansible Playbook for OpenStack Summit Tokyo

The next OpenStack Summit is quickly approaching -- and the schedule is, as always, packed with great sessions, collaboration days, social events, get-togethers, and more.

If you’re joining the event in Tokyo, which runs from October 27-30, and you’re a fan of Ansible, you just might be thinking to yourself… “If only there was a playbook for this!”

Behold! My amazing psychic capabilities alerted me to this exact scenario. Okay, not really, but: in, ahem, "playbook-inspired" format, you’ll find a list of tasks for each type of role -- conference sessions, OpenStack projects using Ansible to know about, the Ansible Collaboration Day onsite at Summit, and how to stay up to date with Ansible-related happenings on-site and beforehand.

Not familiar with Ansible yet, or how it works with OpenStack? Here's the great news: There will be plenty of opportunities for you to learn all about it at OpenStack Summit. And just like Ansible makes it easy for you to deploy and operate your OpenStack cloud -- this blog post makes it easy for you to find the Ansible-related content to get you started on your path to Ansible+OpenStack cloud bliss.

All you have to do is decide which Continue reading

And the winners of Docker Global Hack Day #3 are…

DockerCon EU 2015: Hands-On Labs

Using Vagrant with OpenStack

In my earlier post on using Docker Machine with OpenStack, I talked about combining technologies in a “provider/consumer” model. In this post, I’m going to talk about creating this provider/consumer model using a different combination of technologies: OpenStack as the infrastructure provider and Vagrant for consuming that infrastructure.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vagrant, I recommend you first read this introduction to Vagrant (after that you can dig into all the other Vagrant-tagged posts). As I explain in that first post, Vagrant leverages the idea of providers (which enable Vagrant to work with various back-end virtualization platforms/solutions) as well as boxes (which are essentially VM templates). In this particular case, we’re leveraging an OpenStack provider for Vagrant that allows Vagrant to use OpenStack as the back-end virtualization solution. However, since OpenStack already has the equivalent of VM templates (in the form of images), there’s no need to use a Vagrant box. This makes using Vagrant with OpenStack slightly different than your typical Vagrant use case.

Prerequisites

Let’s start with reviewing some prerequisites—these are the things you’ll need to do/have done before you can use Vagrant with OpenStack (besides the obvious things like having Vagrant installed).

1. You’ll need a working OpenStack Continue reading

Getting to Know John Ryan, Business Development & Channels

 

Knowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in (and outside of!) the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.

This week we're happy to introduce you to John Ryan, who joined Ansible as head of business development and channels. John has more than 30 years of experience in business development, channels, sales and marketing in infrastructure software, open source and network security. He’s held leadership positions at Proofpoint, Apigee, Red Hat, IBM and Sun Microsystems.  John holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.

DockerCon Europe CFP summary and 2nd round of Black Belt speakers!

A Quick Reference to Adding New Storage with LVM

This post walks through the process of adding storage capacity to a Linux server using LVM. There’s nothing new, revolutionary, or cutting-edge about this post—honestly, it’s really more for my own reference than anything else. Adding logical volumes is something that I do so infrequently that it’s hard to remember all the commands, so I’m recording them here for when I need them next time.

First, list the physical disks in the system (all commands should be prefaced with sudo or run as a user with the appropriate permissions):

fdisk -l

This will help you identify which (new) disk needs to be added. In my examples, I’ll use /dev/sdb.

Start partitioning the new disk (replace /dev/sdb with the appropriate values for your system):

fdisk /dev/sdb

I’m assuming that this isn’t a boot drive and that whatever logical volumes you create will take up the entire disk. Once you get into fdisk, follow these steps:

1. Enter n to create a new partition.
2. Enter p to make this a primary partition.
3. Enter 1 to make this the first partition on the disk.
4. Press enter twice to accept default start and end cylinders (unless you know you need to change them).
5. Enter Continue reading

Using Docker Machine with OpenStack

In this post, I’m going to show you how to use Docker Machine with OpenStack. This is something I’ve been interested in testing for a while, and now that I finally have my test lab back up and running, I was able to spend some time on this. I’ll spend some time later in the post covering my reasons for wanting to look at this, but I’ll start with the technical content of how it works.

I tested this setup with the following components:

• The client system was running OS X 10.9.5 with the Docker 1.8.2 client binary and Docker Machine 0.4.1.
• The OpenStack cloud was running the Juno release on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, KVM hypervisors, and VMware NSX for networking.

There are (at least) two approaches to using Docker Machine and OpenStack together:

1. You can use Docker Machine’s generic driver to consume already-provisioned OpenStack instances. This is, in large part, very similar to what I covered here, but I’ll cover it in this post just for the sake of completeness.
2. You can use Docker Machine’s openstack driver to automatically provision and configure new instances on an OpenStack cloud. This is the Continue reading