InfoWorld Bossies 2014
Today we are proud to announce that Docker was named a winner of the InfoWorld Bossies 2014 in two categories:
- The best open source application development tools
- The best open source data center and cloud software
We would like to thank our community and our partners for this award, as Docker would not exist without you!
Thank you!
Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks
With Docker containers fast becoming the standard for building blocks for distributed apps, we’re working with the Docker community to make it easier for users to quickly code and assemble their projects. Official Repos, publicly downloadable for free from the Docker Hub Registry, are curated images informed by user feedback and best practices. They represent a focused community effort to provide great base images for applications, so developers and sysadmins can focus on building new features and functionality while minimizing repetitive work on commodity scaffolding and plumbing.
At DockerCon last June, we announced the first batch of Official Repos which covered many standard tools like OS distributions, web servers, and databases. At the time, we had several organizations join us to curate Official Repos for their particular project, including Fedora, CentOS, and Canonical. And the community responded enthusiastically as well: in the three months since they launched, Official Repos have so grown in popularity that they now account for almost 20% of all image downloads.
Parlez-vous…?
Based on the search queries on the Docker Hub Registry and discussions with many of you, we determined that the community wants pre-built stacks of their favorite programming languages. Specifically, developers Continue reading
Closing Comments on Old Posts
One of the great things about this site is the interaction I enjoy with readers. It’s always great to get comments from readers about how an article was informative, answered a question, or helped solve a problem. Knowing that what I’ve written here is helpful to others is a very large part of why I’ve been writing here for over 9 years.
Until today, I’ve left comments (and sometimes trackbacks) open on very old blog posts. Just the other day I received a comment on a 4 year old article where a reader was sharing another way to solve the same problem. Unfortunately, that has to change. Comment spam on the site has grown considerably over the last few months, despite the use of a number of plugins to help address the issue. It’s no longer just an annoyance; it’s now a problem.
As a result, starting today, all blog posts more than 3 years old will automatically have their comments and trackbacks closed. I hate to do it—really I do—but I don’t see any other solution to the increasing blog spam.
I hope that this does not adversely impact my readers’ ability to interact with me, but it is Continue reading
Closing Comments on Old Posts
One of the great things about this site is the interaction I enjoy with readers. It’s always great to get comments from readers about how an article was informative, answered a question, or helped solve a problem. Knowing that what I’ve written here is helpful to others is a very large part of why I’ve been writing here for over 9 years.
Until today, I’ve left comments (and sometimes trackbacks) open on very old blog posts. Just the other day I received a comment on a 4 year old article where a reader was sharing another way to solve the same problem. Unfortunately, that has to change. Comment spam on the site has grown considerably over the last few months, despite the use of a number of plugins to help address the issue. It’s no longer just an annoyance; it’s now a problem.
As a result, starting today, all blog posts more than 3 years old will automatically have their comments and trackbacks closed. I hate to do it—really I do—but I don’t see any other solution to the increasing blog spam.
I hope that this does not adversely impact my readers’ ability to interact with me, but it is Continue reading
Report: Burrito Quest I
At Docker, we are lucky to be able to spend time exploring San Francisco, one of the world’s great cities in terms of culture, architecture and, of course, burritos. Forget about crabs or sourdough, what San Francisco does best is the burrito, that noble combination of beans, meat, cheese, salsa, and love, all in a convenient wrapper that let’s you eat it one-handed. And. like the City itself, the burrito is incredibly diverse. Do you prefer black beans or pintos? Are you a carnivore who craves the al pastor and the carne asada, or do you seek out the elusive perfect chile relleno burrito (the turducken of Mexico)?
So many options, so many questions. As an engineer-driven company, we needed to know the optimal solution. We had to know where to find the City’s finest burrito.
And so it came to be that Burrito Quest was born. We decided that once a month we would walk to another potential purveyor of the perfect burrito. In order to build a comprehensive test harness, we decided that each user would pursue their own story, be it a simple pollo or a bold lengua. or even a chili relleno, the turducken of Continue reading
Thinking About Intel Rack-Scale Architecture
You may have heard of Intel Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), a new approach to designing data center hardware. This is an idea that was discussed extensively a couple of weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco, which I had the opportunity to attend. (Disclaimer: Intel paid my travel and hotel expenses to attend IDF.)
Of course, IDF 2014 wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Intel RSA; it was also discussed last year. However, this year I had the chance to really dig into what Intel is trying to accomplish through Intel RSA—note that I’ll use “Intel RSA” instead of just “RSA” to avoid any confusion with the security company—and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and conclusions here.
Intel always seems to present Intel RSA as a single entity that is made up of a number of other technologies/efforts; specifically, Intel RSA is typically presented as:
- Disaggregation of the compute, memory, and storage capacity in a rack
- Silicon photonics as a low-latency, high-speed rack-scale fabric
- Some software that combines disaggregated hardware capacity over a rack-scale fabric to create “pooled systems”
When you look at Intel RSA this way—and this is the way that Continue reading
Thinking About Intel Rack-Scale Architecture
You may have heard of Intel Rack-Scale Architecture (RSA), a new approach to designing data center hardware. This is an idea that was discussed extensively a couple of weeks ago at Intel Developer Forum (IDF) 2014 in San Francisco, which I had the opportunity to attend. (Disclaimer: Intel paid my travel and hotel expenses to attend IDF.)
Of course, IDF 2014 wasn’t the first time I’d heard of Intel RSA; it was also discussed last year. However, this year I had the chance to really dig into what Intel is trying to accomplish through Intel RSA—note that I’ll use “Intel RSA” instead of just “RSA” to avoid any confusion with the security company—and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and conclusions here.
Intel always seems to present Intel RSA as a single entity that is made up of a number of other technologies/efforts; specifically, Intel RSA is typically presented as:
-
Disaggregation of the compute, memory, and storage capacity in a rack
-
Silicon photonics as a low-latency, high-speed rack-scale fabric
-
Some software that combines disaggregated hardware capacity over a rack-scale fabric to create “pooled systems”
When you look at Intel RSA this way—and this is the way that Continue reading
Docker Closes $40M Series C Led by Sequoia
Today is a great day for the Docker team and the whole Docker ecosystem.
We are pleased to announce that Docker has closed a $40M Series C funding round led by Sequoia Capital. In addition to giving us significant financial resources, Docker now has the insights and support of a board that includes Benchmark, Greylock, Sequoia, Trinity, and Jerry Yang.
This puts us in a great position to invest aggressively in the future of distributed applications. We’ll be able to significantly expand and build the Docker platform and our ecosystem of developers, contributors, and partners, while developing a broader set of solutions for enterprise users. We are also very fortunate that we’ll be gaining the counsel of Bill Coughran, who was the SVP of Engineering at Google for eight years prior to joining Sequoia, and who helped spearhead the extensive adoption of container-based technologies in Google’s infrastructure.
While the size, composition, and valuation of the round are great, they are really a lagging indicator of the amazing work done by the Docker team and community. They demonstrate the amazing impact our open source project is having. Our user community has grown exponentially into the millions and we have a constantly expanding network of contributors, Continue reading
Three text processing tasks
Unlikely to help someone, but anyway.A Quick Introduction to Vagrant
This post will provide a quick introduction to a tool called Vagrant. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock—or, more likely, been too busy doing real work in your data center to pay attention—you’ve probably heard of Vagrant. Maybe, like me, you had some ideas about what Vagrant is (or isn’t) and what it does (or doesn’t) do. Hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion in this post.
In its simplest form, Vagrant is an automation tool with a domain-specific language (DSL) that is used to automate the creation of VMs and VM environments. The idea is that a user can create a set of instructions, using Vagrant’s DSL, that will set up one or more VMs and possibly configure those VMs. Every time the user uses the precreated set of instructions, the end result will look exactly the same. This can be beneficial for a number of use cases, including developers who want a consistent development environment or folks wanting to share a demo environment with other users.
Vagrant makes this work by using a number of different components:
- Providers: These are the “back end” of Vagrant. Vagrant itself doesn’t provide any virtualization functionality; it relies on Continue reading
A Quick Introduction to Vagrant
This post will provide a quick introduction to a tool called Vagrant. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock—or, more likely, been too busy doing real work in your data center to pay attention—you’ve probably heard of Vagrant. Maybe, like me, you had some ideas about what Vagrant is (or isn’t) and what it does (or doesn’t) do. Hopefully I can clear up some of the confusion in this post.
In its simplest form, Vagrant is an automation tool with a domain-specific language (DSL) that is used to automate the creation of VMs and VM environments. The idea is that a user can create a set of instructions, using Vagrant’s DSL, that will set up one or more VMs and possibly configure those VMs. Every time the user uses the precreated set of instructions, the end result will look exactly the same. This can be beneficial for a number of use cases, including developers who want a consistent development environment or folks wanting to share a demo environment with other users.
Vagrant makes this work by using a number of different components:
-
Providers: These are the “back end” of Vagrant. Vagrant itself doesn’t provide any virtualization functionality; it relies on Continue reading
IDF 2014: Architecting for SDI, a Microserver Perspective
This is a liveblog for session DATS013, on microservers. I was running late to this session (my calendar must have been off—thought I had 15 minutes more), so I wasn’t able to capture the titles or names of the speakers.
The first speaker starts out with a review of exactly what a microserver is; Intel sees microservers as a natural evolution from rack-mounted servers to blades to microservers. Key microserver technologies include: Intel Atom C2000 family of processors; Intel Xeon E5 v2 processor family; and Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 series. Microservers share some common characteristics, such as high integrated platforms (like integrated network) and being designed for high efficiency. Efficiency might be more important than absolute performance.
Disaggregation of resources is a common platform option for microservers. (Once again this comes back to Intel’s rack-scale architecture work.) This leads the speaker to talk about a Technology Delivery Vehicle (TDV) being displayed here at the show; this is essentially a proof-of-concept product that Intel built that incorporates various microserver technologies and design patterns.
Upcoming microserver technologies that Intel has announced or is working on incude:
- The Intel Xeon D, a Xeon-based SoC with integrated 10Gbs Ethernet and running in a Continue reading
IDF 2014: Open Source Storage Optimizations
This is a liveblog of IDF 2014 session DATS009, titled “Ceph: Open Source Storage Software Optimizations on Intel Architecture for Cloud Workloads.” (That’s a mouthful.) The speaker is Anjaneya “Reddy” Chagam, a Principal Engineer in the Intel Data Center Group.
Chagam starts by reviewing the agenda, which—as the name of the session implies—is primarily focused on Ceph. He next transitions into a review of the problem with storage in data centers today; specifically, that storage needs “are growing at a rate unsustainable with today’s infrastructure and labor costs.” Another problem, according to Chagam, is that today’s workloads end up using the same sets of data but in very different ways, and those different ways of using the data have very different performance profiles. Other problems with the “traditional” way of doing storage is that storage processing performance doesn’t scale out with capacity, storage environments are growing increasingly complex (which in turn makes management harder).
Chagam does admit that not all workloads are suited for distributed storage solutions. If you need high availability and high performance (like for databases), then the traditional scale-up model might work better. For “cloud workloads” (no additional context/information provided to qualify what a Continue reading
Provisioning an Autoscaling Infrastructure using Ansible
About Autoscaling
The concepts behind Amazon's Auto Scaling Groups (ASGs) are very promising. Who wouldn't want to have their infrastructure scale automatically with increases and decreases of demand? Plenty of folks are using ASGs to do that today. ASGs do bring about their own challenges, which this series of blog posts will show solutions to by taking advantage of features in Ansible and Ansible Tower.
Continue reading