Docker Tutorial 9 – Docker Machine
This is a casual Docker tutorial series. We started out first with very simple sessions on how to install and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. This ninth video talks about Docker … ContinuedAnsible Tower Now Available with Vagrant
Ansible is about simple, yet powerful automation. We want to make automation easy for everyone to learn, use, and deploy, for developers, system administrators, and operators of every skill level.
Every day we hear the success stories of people who have been able to take Ansible’s powerful automation and use it to cut their IT costs, stabilize their deployments, and allow them to get back to their focus of their job rather than continually grinding through manual tasks.
On top of that, we’ve built Ansible Tower, a web interface and API that brings those same simple principles to applying command, control, and delegation to an Ansible deployment. Customers like Nike, Splunk, Grainger, and others use Tower to centralize their Ansible deployment, delegate credentials and tasks to users in a controlled manner, and allow easy self-service access to users without them knowing the specifics of those automation.
We’re always interested in making things simpler for our users, and this extends to deploying and trying Tower as well. That’s why we’ve decided to make Tower available for use with Vagrant - what’s simpler than that?
You can try out Ansible Tower in Vagrant with just a few commands.
$ vagrant init tower
DockerCon 2015 Hackathon: Ready to Hack Docker?
The Docker team is organizing a 24-hour hackathon for the Docker community during the weekend before DockerCon 2015. Thanks to help from our sponsor Rancher Labs, this year’s DockerCon Hackathon will be our largest ever! Spots are limited for this … ContinuedUsing PXE with virt-install
In this post, I’ll just share a quick command that can be used to build and install a KVM guest using PXE instead of an ISO image. There’s nothing new here; this is just me documenting a command so that it’s easier for me (and potentially others) to find next time I need it.
I shared how to use the virt-install command to build KVM guest domains in a blog post talking about working with KVM guests. In that post, I used an ISO image with the virt-install command to build the guest domain.
However, there may be times when you would prefer to use PXE instead of an ISO image. To build a KVM guest domain and instruct the guest domain to boot via PXE, you would use this command (I’ve inserted backslashes and line returns to improve readability):
sudo virt-install --name=guest-name --ram=2048 --vcpus=1
--disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/guest-disk.qcow2,bus=virtio
--pxe --noautoconsole --graphics=vnc --hvm
--network network=net-name,model=virtio
--os-variant=ubuntuprecise
The key here is the --pxe parameter, which virt-install uses to instruct the guest domain to PXE boot instead of booting from a virtual CD-ROM backed by an ISO image.
Naturally, you’d want to substitute the desired values for the KVM Continue reading
Ansible Collaboration Day at OpenStack Summit
OpenStack has long had a reputation for being difficult to install and manage. This reputation may be a bit overblown, but it's not entirely unwarranted.
The plain truth is that OpenStack has a lot of components, all of which must be working in concert to be successful. A simple misconfiguration in one component can lead to cascading failures throughout the system, which can then be difficult to diagnose and correct.
It's one of the essential problems of managing any distributed system: one must effectively manage both individual components (i.e. configuration) and the relationships between those components (i.e. orchestration).
Ansible is a simple tool that excels at both -- which helps to explain Ansible's surging popularity in the OpenStack ecosystem. Over the past year, several OpenStack projects have emerged to take full advantage of Ansible's power and simplicity.
We've been watching with great interest. Now we think it's time to get more directly involved.
On Monday, May 18th, we will hold an Ansible Collaboration Day at the OpenStack Summit. Our collective goal is simple and ambitious: to make the installation and management of OpenStack as simple as we can possibly make it.
The first part of the day will Continue reading
Your Docker Agenda in May
April was quite an eventful month for the Docker Community. By the end of April, over 1,200 people attended the 24 birthday events organized by the Docker community in 11 countries. With the overwhelming number of contributions we received, we … ContinuedSpecial Ansible Tower Offer
To celebrate the release of O'Reilly's Ansible Up and Running: Automating Configuration Management and Deployment the Easy Way by Lorin Hochstein we are offering a special package for Ansible fans. Buy an Ansible Tower Starter Kit and get a physical copy of the book, 2 Ansible t-shirts, 2 Ansible hats, stickers, pins and an Ansibull.
To take advantage of this offer simply purchase an Ansible Tower Starter Kit here and enter ansiblefan at checkout. Offer expires on 6/5/15 or while supplies last. Quantities are limited so act fast.
*Offer available to NEW Ansible Tower customers only.
Online Meetup Recap: Docker Swarm 0.2.0
As you might already by now, we scheduled a series of Docker online meetups covering the updates included in the release of the latest versions of Docker Engine, Registry, Compose, Swarm, and Machine. Two weeks ago, Tibor Vass (core maintainer … ContinuedAnnouncing the 3rd Batch of DockerCon 2015 Speakers
Today, we’re excited to share with you the 3rd batch of speakers selected by the DockerCon Community Review Committee. We feel extremely fortunate to have such an amazing and diverse speaker lineup. From Docker use cases to DevOps culture talks and deep technical … ContinuedA Quick Introduction to LXD
With the recent release of Ubuntu 15.04, aka “Vivid Vervet”, the Ubuntu community has also unveiled an early release of LXD (pronounced “lex-dee”), a new project aimed at revitalizing the use of LXC and LXC-based containers in the face of application container efforts such as Docker and rkt. In this post, I’ll provide a quick introduction to LXD.
To make it easier to follow along with some of the examples of using LXD, I’ve created an lxd directory in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository. In that directory, you’ll find a Vagrantfile that will allow you to quickly and easily spin up one or more VMs with LXD.
Relationship between LXD and LXC
LXD works in conjunction with LXC and is not designed to replace or supplant LXC. Instead, it’s intended to make LXC-based containers easier to use through the addition of a back-end daemon supporting a REST API and a straightforward CLI client that works with both the local daemon and remote daemons via the REST API. You can get more information about LXD via the LXD web site. Also, if you’re unfamiliar with LXC, check out this brief introduction to LXC. Once you’ve read that, you can browse some Continue reading
Docker Tutorial 8 – Troubleshooting with Sysdig
This is a casual Docker tutorial series. We will start out first with very simple sessions on how to install and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. In this eighth video we … ContinuedA framework for BackupPC‘s pre/post scripts
Use the same framework for all hosts, and run per-host scripts where needed.Understanding Docker Security and Best Practices
Nathan McCauley and I have been working on a bunch of things since joining Docker. One area that we noticed is lacking is in the availability of information around Docker architecture and best practices in securely configuring and deploying Dockerized … ContinuedTwo New Official Images Added in April
We’re excited to highlight two new Official Images that we added to Docker Hub in April. These images are the latest additions to a growing library of quality content maintained by Docker and our partners. Check them out: Drupal Drupal … ContinuedDocker’s 2nd Birthday, By the Numbers
Back in March, we invited you to be a part of Docker’s first-ever open-source-a-thon to celebrate the project’s 2nd birthday and work towards a good cause. Now that over a month of events and online contributions have come to a … ContinuedONLINE MEETUP VIDEO: DOCKER MACHINE 0.2.0
In case you’re just tuning in, we recently released Docker 1.6 which includes major updates to Docker Engine, Machine, Swarm, Compose, and Registry. To help introduce these tools and new features to you, we are covering them in depth via a … ContinuedInterop Liveblog: The Post-Cloud
This session is titled “The Post-Cloud,” and the speaker is Nick Weaver, Director of SDI-X at Intel.
Nick starts his presentation with a summary of our society: some people produce goods through an effort, and others consume what is produced. Things have changed over the years that have affected this production-consumption model, but Nick quickly turns his focus to the use of machines in the production portion of this cycle. As production efficiency increased, the level of consumption also increased. This is especially true for computing machines, and how people consume the services/information produced by the computing machines.
This brings Nick around to a discussion of Jevons’ Paradox, which basically states that the increased efficiency of producing something actually leads to an increase in consumption, not a decrease of consumption.
So what does efficiency in technology look like? Technology enables things; by itself, it doesn’t really add value. Therefore, efficiency in technology means enabling more (or more powerful) things. Nick starts his discussion on technology efficiency with a discussion of DevOps, and what DevOps means. Although a number of technologies are involved to deal with the ever-increasing complexity and density that has emerged, DevOps is really about a culture change. Continue reading
Interop Liveblog: Thursday Cloud Connect Keynote
This is a liveblog of the Thursday morning Cloud Connect keynote at Interop 2015 in Las Vegas. The title of the presentation is “Doing it Live,” and the speaker is Jared Wray (@jaredwray on Twitter; he’s Cloud CTO and SVP of Platform at CenturyLink).
As the session kicks off, Wray shares that his presentation was drastically altered, a nod to the drastic changes that he is seeing at CenturyLink. He then shares a bit of background on him, his history in IT, and the events that brought him to CenturyLink. Wray then spends a few minutes talking about CenturyLink and CenturyLink’s services, which he insists “isn’t a product pitch” (it feels like one). The key tenets of CenturyLink’s offerings are that they are fully automated; they are programmable; and they are self service.
Wray points out that CenturyLink’s transformation to next generation platform services and containers requires that they also transform their operations (and people, though that is called out separately).
According to Wray, the blanket “move everything to the cloud” doesn’t work; enterprises must embrace a “cap and grow” strategy. This means not moving applications if there is no benefit (and also moving applications to maintenance mode until Continue reading