Cup of Joe with Jon and James
Cup of Joe with Jon and James
Two of Ansible’s very own Solutions architects, James Martin and Jonathan Davilla, will be hanging out at various coffee shops in the Washington, DC metro region in the upcoming weeks. Stop by during your lunch hour and ask them about automation, DevOps culture, Ansible, and the difference between a latte and a machiatto. Follow them on twitter for last minute updates @grepless and @defionscode.
3/13 , 11am-2pm - Swing’s Coffee 1702 G Street NW
3/27, 11am-2pm - Chinatown Coffee 475 H St. NW
AnsibleFest New York City SUPER Early Bird Tickets Now Available
We are excited to announce that the next AnsibleFest will be held in New York City!
We are still working out the details, but we wanted to make some tickets available at a huge discount. AnsibleFest NYC is currently being planned for early June and will be at a great venue in New York City. If you are flexible and can plan ahead as well as make changes to your schedule, these tickets are for you!
The SUPER Early Bird price is just $179 (over 30% off the standard price) and is only available until March 23, 2015.
Purchase Super Early Bird AnsibleFest tickets here
We'll be announcing the exact date and location soon!
Choosing CoreOS over Project Atomic
Upon hearing the news that Red Hat had released the Atomic Host variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take a look at the CentOS flavor of the Atomic Host variant. In case you’re unfamiliar, the Atomic Host variant is the result of Project Atomic, which aimed to provide a container-optimized flavor of RHEL/CentOS/Fedora. This container-optimized flavor would leverage rpm-ostree for atomic system updates (hence the name) and come with Docker preinstalled. What I found, frankly, disappointed me.
Before I continue, I will make two very important disclaimers:
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Note that there has been no official announcement of the release of final builds of an Atomic Host variant for CentOS 7. So, it’s entirely possible that all the issues I mention here are known issues that will be addressed. That being said, I did find CentOS 7 Atomic Host builds dated March 5, 2015; this is the same date as the Red Hat announcement. It’s reasonable, therefore, to believe that these builds are very close to final builds.
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It’s entirely possible these issues are the result of errors on my part. I’ve spent most of my time with Continue reading
(Semi-)Automated ~/.ssh/config management
Shorten your ssh commands, but in a kludgy way.Running a Small Docker Swarm Cluster
In this post, I’m going to show you how to set up and run your own Docker Swarm cluster. Docker Swarm is a relatively new orchestration tool from Docker (the company) that allows you to create a cluster of hosts running Docker (the open source project) and schedule containers across the cluster. However, just scheduling and running containers across a cluster isn’t enough, so I’ll show you how to add service registration and service discovery to this environment using Consul.
In the event you’re interested in following along, I’ve created a set of files that will allow you to use Vagrant to run this Docker Swarm cluster (on your laptop, if so desired). You can find all these files in the “docker-swarm” folder of my GitHub learning-tools repository.
The Docker Swarm cluster I’m going to show you how to build has 3 major components:
- A cluster of systems running Consul. In this case, Consul serves a dual purpose. First, it’s used as the discovery service for the Docker Swarm cluster itself. Second, it provides service registration and service discovery functionality for the Docker containers launched on the Swarm cluster.
- A set of hosts running the Docker daemon (version 1.4. Continue reading
Join us for Docker Birthday and Open-Source-a-thon to support whales and marine wildlife
Two weeks ago, we proudly announced the organization of a global open-source-a-thon to celebrate the Docker project’s 2nd birthday. Today, we’re excited to share more details around the event series and how you can participate. During the week of March … ContinuedThirteen new Official Repositories added in January and February
We are excited to highlight thirteen new Official Repositories that were added to Docker Hub in January and February. These repos feature both open-source and enterprise-ready content that will empower dev teams to build and deploy distributed applications. Check them … ContinuedSocketPlane Excited to Be Joining Docker to Collaborate with Networking Ecosystem
At Socketplane we started out as four guys with a collectively strong belief in open source and open communities. We aligned around a shared vision that we wanted to be a critical part of Docker’s once in a decade disruption. … ContinuedSecured at Docker – Diogo Mónica and Nathan McCauley
I’m thrilled to officially announce that Nathan McCauley and I are joining Docker to lead the Security Team. Back in 2011, Nathan and I were fortunate enough to join Square just as it was picking up steam. Square disrupted traditional … ContinuedManaging VMware vSphere guests with Ansible Tower
There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call 'a private cloud'. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click?
Ansible Core contains a module for managing virtual machines in VMware vSphere environments called vsphere_guest. Using this one module we can talk to an existing vSphere instance to create new VMs, clone VM templates, and control and delete VMs. Couple up a simple playbook with Ansible Tower and we can do some pretty amazing things with very little effort.
Here's our playbook to create a new virtual machine from a template in vSphere:
The really important bit that's doing the work is the 15 lines associated with the 'Create VM from template' task. Note the extensive use of variables in this play to give us lots of flexibility. We'll make use of this in Tower in just a moment.
Tower 2.1 introduced 'Surveys', which are a great way to create interactive forms for a given play. The form can Continue reading
Experimenting with Docker, Registrator, and Consul
Over the last few days, I’ve been experimenting with Docker, Registrator, and Consul in an effort to explore some of the challenges involved in building a robust containerized infrastructure. While I haven’t finished fully exploring the idea (and documenting what I’ve learned), I did discover one interesting—and unexpected—interaction.
Here’s a quick overview of my testing environment:
- I used two OpenStack Heat templates to spin up two clusters of 5 instances each.
- The first cluster is a set of CoreOS Linux instances, customized via cloud-init to not run etcd. These instances are attached to a VMware NSX-powered logical network using IP addresses from the 10.1.1.0/24 subnet.
- On each CoreOS Linux instance, I have Registrator running as a Docker container and listening to the Docker socket (thus listening to Docker events).
- The second cluster is a set of Ubuntu 14.04 instances running Consul. These instances are connected to an NSX-powered logical network using IP addresses from the 10.1.2.0/24 subnet.
- The two logical networks are connected by a logical router and thus have full connectivity.
Registrator, if you’re not already familiar with it, is a service registry tool that listens to the Docker Continue reading
Orchestrating Docker with Machine, Swarm and Compose
Back in December, we announced our new tools for orchestrating distributed apps: Machine, Swarm, and Compose. Today the first versions of these tools are available to download. They’re not ready for production yet, but we’d really like for you to … ContinuedAnnouncing Docker Machine Beta
At DockerCon EU earlier this year, we announced Docker Machine, a tool that makes it really easy to go from “zero to Docker”. Machine creates Docker Engines on your computer, on cloud providers, and/or in your data center, and then … ContinuedScaling Docker with Swarm
We are extremely excited to announce the first beta release of Swarm, a native clustering tool for Docker. For the past two years, Docker has made the lives of millions of developers easier by making building, shipping and running applications … ContinuedAnnouncing Docker Compose
Today we’re excited to announce that Docker Compose is available for download. Docker Compose is an orchestration tool that makes spinning up multi-container applications effortless. Head to the install docs to download it. With Compose, you define your application’s components … ContinuedAnsibleFest NYC 2015
We are in the planning stages of our next stop in the AnsibleFest 2015 tour. We had a our biggest turnout ever at AnsibleFest London and know that our New York event will be even bigger and better!
AnsibleFest NYC is currently scheduled for late May/early June in NYC.
Details are being finalized now and tickets will go on sale soon.
If you are interested in speaking please email [email protected]
If you are interested in sponsoring please email [email protected]
Your Docker schedule at IBM Interconnect 2015
Next week starts the giant IBM Interconnect Conference in Las Vegas, NV. If you are attending the conference come talk to us at the Docker Booth 202-4 and learn more about Docker by attending some of the sessions listed below. The Docker team will … ContinuedEnabling and Mounting NFS on CoreOS
I’ve written about CoreOS a fair amount (see here, here, and here), but one of the things that is both good and bad about CoreOS is the automatic update mechanism. It’s good because you know your systems will stay up to date, but it’s bad if you haven’t taken the time to properly address how automatic updates will affect your environment (for example, you’ve manually started some Docker containers instead of using systemd unit files—when the CoreOS system reboots after an update, your Docker containers will no longer be running). Re-architecting your environment to fully account for this change in architecture and behavior is a larger discussion than can be addressed in a single blog post, but in this post I want to at least tackle one small part of the discussion: separating your persistent data. In this post, I’ll show you how to mount an NFS share on a CoreOS instance deployed on OpenStack (or any cloud that leverages cloud-init).
Now, you could probably go into your CoreOS instance and manually make these changes, but that’s still thinking the old way. In addition to thinking about keeping persistent data separate, we (data center/cloud architects) also need Continue reading
Docker Project Announces Open-Source-a-thon to Support Whale and Marine Wildlife Conservation
Docker Project Announces Open-Source-a-thon to Support Whale and Marine Wildlife Conservation Partnering with Oceanic Society to link open source contributions to driving “blue” conservation SAN FRANCISCO – February 19, 2015 – The Docker Project, the open platform for distributed applications, … ContinuedUsing Python’s Virtual Environments with Git For More Than Coding
Most think of python virtualenv as a way to create isolated development environments within a single PC, Laptop, Server, whatever their choice is. This is true, it’s what virtualenv was created...[[ Summary content only, you can read everything now, just visit the site for full story ]]