Our journey from office-centric to remote-first
Docker Inc. started like many startups with engineers working from a single location. For us, this was in the Bay Area in the US. We were very office-centric, so the natural way to increase diversity and to get engineers from different cultures to work together was to open new offices in diverse locations. Right from the start, our goal was to mix American and European ways of producing software, giving us the best of both cultures.
Step 1 – Opening European offices
In 2015, Docker started to open offices in Europe, starting with Cambridge in the United Kingdom and followed by Paris in France. With these two locations, the long road to gaining experience working with remote employees began.
Having multiple offices scattered around the world is different from being fully remote. But you still start experiencing some of the challenges of not having everybody in the same location simultaneously. We spent a great deal of our time on planes or trains visiting each other.
Despite the robust open-source culture of the company, which shows that you can build great software while not having everybody in the same room, we still had a very office-centric culture. A lot of the Continue reading
Review: 2020 M1-Based MacBook Pro
I hadn’t done a personal hardware refresh in a while; my laptop was a 2017-era MacBook Pro (with the much-disliked butterfly keyboard) and my tablet was a 2014-era iPad Air 2. Both were serviceable but starting to show their age, especially with regard to battery life. So, a little under a month ago, I placed an order for some new Apple equipment. Included in that order was a new 2020 13" MacBook Pro with the Apple-designed M1 CPU. In this post, I’d like to provide a brief review of the 2020 M1-based MacBook Pro based on the past month of usage.
The “TL;DR” of my review is this: the new M1-based MacBook Pro offers impressive performance and even more impressive battery life. While the raw performance may not “blow away” its 2020 Intel-based counterpart—at least, it didn’t in my real-world usage—the M1-based MacBook Pro offered consistently responsive performance with a battery life that easily blew past any other laptop I’ve ever used, bar none.
Read on for more details.
Hardware
The build quality is really good, with a significant improvement in keyboard quality relative to the earlier butterfly keyboard models (such as my 2017-era MacBook Pro). However, the overall design Continue reading
Ansible Community Steering Committee
As we all know, Ansible is a well-adapted tool for the end-to-end automation of IT infrastructures. At the same time, due to the addition of new features and developments within the project, the Ansible community is growing at an accelerated rate. To help structure the project and also to facilitate the change in direction, we are launching a Steering Committee for the Ansible Community Project.
The Steering Committee’s role is to provide guidance, suggestions, and ensure delivery of the Ansible Community package. The committee shall be broadly representative of the planning and approval areas.
The initial Steering Committee members, selected based on their wide knowledge of and active contributions to the Ansible project, are:
- Toshio Kuratomi (abadger1999)
- Felix Fontein (felixfontein)
- Tadej Borovšak (tadeboro)
- James Cassell (cyberpear)
- John Barker (gundalow)
- Andrew Klychkov (andersson007_)
- Alicia Cozine (acozine)
- Sorin Sbarnea (zbr)
- Jill Rouleau (jillr)
- Brad Thornton (cidrblock)
- Dylan Silva (thaumos)
Members of the committee will work with community users plus Ansible teams within Red Hat to assist in the composition of idea proposals/new collection inclusion requests. Rather than advocating on behalf of particular interests or perspectives, the job of the Steering Committee members is to listen carefully to their fellow community members, discuss, Continue reading
Today Is The Day!
It’s here! Ready or not, DockerCon — our free, one-day, all-digital event designed for developers by developers — has arrived. Registration is open until 9 a.m., so if you haven’t already done so, go ahead and sign up!
This is your chance to learn all you can about modern application delivery in a cloud-native world — including the application development technology, skills, tools and people you need to help solve the problems you face day to day.
Final reminders: Don’t forget to catch our line-up of keynote speakers including Docker CEO Scott Johnston, and to bring your questions to Live Panels hosted by Docker Captain Bret Fisher, as well as our two developer-focused panels and Hema Ganapathy’s women’s panel. Just put your questions on selected topics in chat, and the team will do their best to answer them.
If you still need guidance on what to focus on, here’s a reminder of what not to miss. And don’t forget to come celebrate our global community in Community Rooms — a first at DockerCon.
That’s it! Now go forth and carpe DockerCon!
DockerCon LIVE 2021
Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is Continue reading
A Big Thank You to Our DockerCon Live 2021 Sponsors
With DockerCon just a day away, let’s not forget to give a big THANK YOU to all our sponsors.
As our ecosystem partners, they play a central role in our strategy to deliver the best developer experience from local desktop to cloud, and/or to offer best-in-class solutions to help you build apps faster, easier and more securely. Translation: We couldn’t do what we do without them.
So be sure to visit their virtual rooms and special sessions at DockerCon this Thursday, May 27. With more than 20 Platinum, Gold or Silver sponsors this year, you’ll have plenty to choose from.
For example, check out AWS’s virtual room and the session with AWS Principal Technologist Massimo Re Ferrè at 3:15 p.m.-3:45 p.m. PDT.
And check out Microsoft’s virtual room and any of the three sessions it’s offering — How to Package DevOps Tools Using Docker Containers (3:45 p.m.- 4:15 p.m.), Container-Based Development with Visual Studio Code (4:15 p.m.- 4:45 p.m.), and Supercharging Machine Learning Development with Azure Machine Learning and Containers in VS Code! (4:45 p.m.- 5:15 p.m.).
Or there’s Mirantis’ virtual room and their two Continue reading
DockerCon 2021: Women in Tech Panel
At Docker, we feel strongly about embracing diversity and we are committed to being proactive with respect to inclusion. As an example of our support for diversity, we are hosting the Community Rooms during DockerCon with panels and sessions for our global audience in their native languages. We are also highlighting the contributions from our women Captains and community developers.
At DockerCon, the Women in Tech panel will focus on the breadth and depth of knowledge from our panelists and their experiences using Docker technology throughout their career. Join us as we discuss the career choices that led these women to become application developers and hear about key innovations that they are working on.
Women in Tech Panel 4:15 Pacific on May 27, 2021
This panel is just one event out of a one day event packed with demonstrations, product announcement, company updates and more – all of it is focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.
Our panelists and moderators include:
Hema Ganapathy – Moderator
Product Marketing, Docker
Hema is a highly seasoned technology professional with 30+ years of experience in software development, telecommunications, cloud computing and big data. She has held senior positions in Continue reading
DockerCon Is Almost Here!
Can you feel it? DockerCon is just days away. There’s still time to register before the one-day, free, virtual extravaganza takes place this Thursday, May 27. Demonstrations, product announcements, company updates — you name it, it’s on the program. All of it focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.
Do DockerCon your way. There’s tons of options. Be sure to catch our line-up of top-notch keynote speakers, which includes Docker CEO Scott Johnston, CTO Justin Cormack, VP of Products Donnie Berkholz, and special guests from GitHub and Orbital Insight.
Check out our recent blog on what not to miss, such as sessions on coding using Docker’s new HTTP APIs, a dive into Docker Dev Environments, tips for navigating a multi-architecture world, and what to do if your container image has more vulnerabilities than you have Twitter followers.
Got questions? Find answers via Live Panels hosted by Docker Captain Bret Fisher, join Peter McKee on two developer focused panels and participate in Hema Ganapathy’s women’s panel. Just put your questions on selected topics in chat, and the team will do their best to answer them. Note: These live streamed Q&A sessions tend to be DevOps focused Continue reading
What Not to Miss at DockerCon 2021
You’ll have no shortage of content to choose from at DockerCon 2021. The one-day virtual event on May 27 will offer a smorgasbord of demonstrations, product announcements, company updates and more — all of it focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.
But if you need some help narrowing down what’s in the must-see category, allow us to recommend the following key sessions. They include hands-on coding using Docker’s new HTTP APIs, a dive into Docker Dev Environments, tips for navigating a multi-architecture world, and what to do if your container image has more vulnerabilities than you have Twitter followers.
Check them out. They’re all free! And if you can’t participate live, you can watch recordings at your own pace.
DockerCon LIVE 2021
Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon LIVE 2021 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Continue reading
Answering Your Questions at DockerCon LIVE 2021
Guest post by Docker Captain Bret Fisher, a DevOps consultant and the creator of the popular Docker Mastery Udemy course. Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE for a free, one day virtual event at https://dockr.ly/2PSJ7vn
I have the pleasure of hosting many of the live events at DockerCon this year. You may remember my 7+ hour non-stop live stream from last year’s DockerCon LIVE 2020 with nearly 20 guests:
We’re back!
This year we’re calling them Live Panels. You’ll find them in their own track in the schedule.
If you’ve never visited one of my live streams before, they tend to be DevOps focused, and as practical and real-world as we can be. Come ready to ask my guests questions in chat on our selected topics, and we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can! You get to guide the conversation with the live stream chat Q&A.
I’m hosting three live panels on three topics. I wanted to discuss the top three things that I think are the hottest topics in Docker and Cloud Native container tech today for developers and DevOps professionals, so be sure to stop Continue reading
Fun with private Automation Hub – Part 1
With the introduction of Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 at AnsibleFest 2020, Ansible released private Automation Hub. This enables a means to deliver, manage and curate Ansible Automation Platform Certified Content via a central on-premises, self-hosted solution for use by internal automation communities.
This sparked my interest in digging deeper into what private Automation Hub is and how I could leverage it. My initial perception went from a mysterious black box to viewing it as the perfect Ansible Automation Platform sidecar.
I learned quite a bit on how I could optimize it for my environments and wanted to share my findings. Before we start, a brief history of Ansible content and Ansible Content Collections may be helpful.
"Following the light of the sun, we left the Old World." - Christopher Columbus on Ansible Collections
During 2017, the number of modules, roles and content under Ansible's GitHub repository surged. The backlog of issues started to increase as the inflow of new content for different platforms and network appliances/devices outpaced the growth of the Ansible Core team. Various YouTube videos and blog posts provided commentary and insights from the Ansible community. The rapid growth of Ansible content led to the birth Continue reading
The Next Step
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is typically attributed as the creator of the well-known phrase “Change is the only constant.” Since I left VMware in 2018 to join Heptio, change has been my companion. First, there was the change of focus, moving to a focus on Kubernetes and related technologies. Then there was the acquisition of Heptio by VMware, and all the change that comes with an acquisition. Just when things were starting to settle down, along came the acquisition of Pivotal by VMware and several more rounds of changes as a result. Today, I mark the start of another change, as I begin a new role and take the next step in my career journey.
Last week, I announced via Twitter that I was leaving VMware to explore a new opportunity. Today, I start at Kong, Inc., as a Principal Field Engineer. Kong, if you aren’t already familiar, is a company focused on service connectivity for modern architectures, with products like their eponymous API gateway and the Envoy-powered Kuma service mesh. I’m really looking forward to getting much more familiar with Envoy, the Kong API gateway, Kuma, and related projects and technologies. I still get to be Continue reading
Getting started with Route Maps Resource Modules
Red Hat Ansible Engine v2.9 introduced the first set of Resource Modules that make network automation easier and more consistent, especially in multi-vendor environments. These network resource specific and opinionated Ansible modules help us avoid creating overly complex Jinja2 templates to render and push network configurations, thereby easing the adoption of network automation both in green and brownfield environments. The resource modules, along with the tools provided in ansible.utils, are highly focused on allowing the end user to manipulate network configuration as “structured data” and not have to worry about network platform specific details.
In the past, we have gone through resource modules that facilitate managing BGP, OSPFv2, ACLs and VLANS configurations on network devices. In this blog post, we’ll cover the newly added route maps resource modules using cisco.nxos.nxos_route_maps as an example.
Route maps are used to define which routes from a source routing protocol are to be distributed to a target routing protocol. It also allows filtering routes that are sent or received between BGP peers. Every route map can have multiple entries, with each entry having a sequence number and an action (the “permit” or “deny” clause) associated with it. Continue reading
Video: Docker Build – Working with Docker and VSCode
Tune in as host Peter McKee turns over the controls to Brandon Waterloo for a show-and-tell of how to work with Docker and Visual Studio Code (VSCode). A senior software engineer at Microsoft, Waterloo is the lead developer of the Docker extension and works mainly on the Docker extension for VSCode.
VSCode is a streamlined source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS that’s fine-tuned for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. The Docker extension makes it easier to build apps that leverage Docker containers, helps scaffold needed files, build Docker images, debug your app inside a container and more.
Follow along as Waterloo builds a basic Python FastAPI app with a Redis backend and a simple hit counter, adding Docker files in order to containerize it. Along the way, he and McKee talk scaffolding, running, debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets and the climate benefits of living in Texas (McKee) versus Michigan (Waterloo).
Watch the video here:
Join Us for DockerCon LIVE 2021
Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who Continue reading
Docker Hub Incident Reviews – April 3rd and 15th 2021
In line with our promise last year to continue publishing incident reviews for Docker Hub, we have two to discuss from April. While many users were unaffected, it is important for us to be transparent with our community, and we hope it is both informative and instructive.
April 3rd 2021
Starting at about 07:30 UTC, a small proportion of registry requests (under 3%) against Docker Hub began failing. Initial investigation pointed towards several causes, including overloaded internal DNS services and significant and unusual load from several users and IPs. Changes were made to address all of these (scaling, blocking, etc), and while the issue seemed to resolve for several hours at a time, it continued coming back.
The issue re-occurred intermittently into the next day, at which point the actual root cause was determined to be under-scaled load balancers doing service discovery and routing for our applications.
In the past, the bottleneck for the load balancing system was network bandwidth on the nodes, and auto scaling rules were thus tied to bandwidth metrics. Over time and across some significant changes to this system, the load balancing application had become more CPU intensive, and thus the current auto scaling setup Continue reading
DockerCon LIVE 2021 Keynotes
Join us for DockerCon LIVE 2021 on Thursday, May 27. DockerCon LIVE is a free, one day virtual event that is a unique experience for developers and development teams who are building the next generation of modern applications. If you want to learn about how to go from code to cloud fast and how to solve your development challenges, DockerCon LIVE 2021 offers engaging live content to help you build, share and run your applications. Register today at https://dockr.ly/2PSJ7vn
With DockerCon just around the corner, we’re pleased to announce our outstanding keynote speaker line-up.
Among the Docker luminaries taking the virtual stage May 27 will be CEO Scott Johnston, CTO Justin Cormack and VP of Products Donnie Berkholz. Look for keynotes, too, from special guests Dana Lawson, GitHub VP of Engineering, and Matt Falk, VP of Engineering, Data Science and Computer Vision at Orbital Insight.
Picking up hosting duties will be Docker’s Peter McKee and William Quiviger, along with DevOps consultant and Docker Captain Bret Fisher.
They’re just part of the one-day event packed with demonstrations, product announcements, company updates and more — all of it focused on modern application delivery in a cloud-native world.
Last year 78,000 registrants Continue reading
Ansible Network Resource Purge parameter
Red Hat Ansible Network Automation continues to be a popular domain for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. We have continually developed additional resource modules to make automating network appliances easier, and more approachable, for novices and experts alike. These resource modules provide a consistent experience across multiple network vendors. There are seven main state parameters for resource modules: merged, replaced, overridden, deleted, gathered, rendered and parsed. The Ansible network team is adding one more parameter, purged, to this tool chest for resource modules. This blog will cover the purged parameter and show use-cases through a practical example.
For this example, we will be using two BGP resource modules to configure a Cisco network device. We will be using the bgp_global module, which was covered in Rohit’s blog post, and the bgp_address_family module. The BGP configuration is split between these two separate modules to simplify configuration and data models associated with them.
Let’s start with a data model:
bgp_global:
as_number: '65000'
bgp:
log_neighbor_changes: true
router_id:
address: 192.168.1.1
neighbor:
- activate: true
address: 10.200.200.2
remote_as: 65001
bgp_address_family:
address_family:
- afi: ipv4
neighbor:
- activate: true
address: 10.200.200.2
network:
- address: 10.25. Continue readingTechnology Short Take 140
Welcome to Technology Short Take #140! It’s hard to believe it’s already the start of May 2021—my how time flies! In this Technology Short Take, I’ve gathered some links for you covering topics like Azure and AWS networking, moving from macOS to Linux (and back again), and more. Let’s jump right into the content!
Networking
- Ivan Pepelnjak takes a look at why you might want to use Azure Route Server, followed by pulling back the covers on how Azure Route Server works.
- Maegan Jong and Dominik Tornow have a blog series that, in their words, “aims to advance the understanding of Kubernetes and its underlying concepts.” Specifically, this post talks about Kubernetes networking.
- Michael Kashin combines networking and programming in this post on getting started with eBPF and Go.
- This post on isolated networks on AWS takes a pretty comprehensive look at what’s required to build isolated AWS networks, including a look at potential data exfiltration paths.
Servers/Hardware
- Ben Wilcock shares his experience with an Intel NUC 11.
- VentureBeat discusses Armv9, a new architectural update for Arm-based CPUs.
Security
- Peyton Smith and Mitchell Moser share seven common Microsoft Active Directory misconfigurations that adversaries tend to abuse.
- Paulos Continue reading
Video: How to Dockerize a Python App with FastAPI
Join host Peter McKee and Python wizard Michael Kennedy for a warts-and-all demo of how to Dockerize a Python app using FastAPI, a popular Python framework. Kennedy is a developer and entrepreneur, and the founder and host of two successful Python podcasts — Talk Python To Me and Python Bytes. He’s also a Python Software Foundation Fellow.
With some skillful back-seat driving by McKee, Kennedy shows how to build a bare-bones web API — in this case one that allows you to ask questions and get answers about movies (director, release date, etc.) — by mashing together a movie service and FastAPI. Next, he shows how to put it into a Docker container, create an app and run it, finally sharing the image on GitHub.
If you’re looking for a scripted, flawless, pre-recorded demo, this is not the one for you! McKee and Kennedy iterate and troubleshoot their way through the process — which makes this a great place to start if you’re new to Dockerizing Python apps. Install scripts, libraries, automation, security, best practices, and a pinch of Python zen — it’s all here. (Duration 1 hour, 10 mins.)
Join Us for DockerCon LIVE 2021
Join us Continue reading
Monitoring as code with Sensu + Ansible
A comprehensive infrastructure as code (IaC) initiative should include monitoring and observability. Incorporating the active monitoring of the infrastructure under management results in a symbiotic relationship in which failures are detected automatically, enabling event-driven code changes and new deployments.
In this post, I’ll recap a webinar I hosted with Tadej Borovšak, Ansible Evangelist at XLAB Steampunk (who we collaborated with on our certified Ansible Content Collection for Sensu Go). You’ll learn how monitoring as code can serve as a feedback loop for IaC workflows, improving the overall automation solution and how to automate your monitoring with the certified Ansible Content Collection for Sensu Go (with demos!).
Before we dive in, here’s a brief overview of Sensu.
About Sensu
Sensu is the turn-key observability pipeline that delivers monitoring as code on any cloud — from bare metal to cloud native. Sensu provides a flexible observability platform for DevOps and SRE teams, allowing them to reuse their existing monitoring and observability tools, and integrates with best-of-breed solutions — like Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
With Sensu, you can reuse existing tooling, like Nagios plugins, as well as monitor ephemeral, cloud-based infrastructure, like Red Hat OpenShift. Sensu helps you Continue reading
Community Rooms at DockerCon LIVE 2021
The Docker community spans the four corners of the world. To celebrate the global nature of our community at DockerCon this year, we’ve created something new: Community Rooms.
Building on the learnings of our “regional rooms experiment” during our last Community All-Hands, Community Rooms are virtual spaces that DockerCon attendees will be able to join to discuss, share and learn about Docker in their own language and/or around a specific topic area.
100% LIVE
The main focus of these Community Rooms is to bring people together and encourage interaction so we have set them up to be 100% live. Yep, that’s right, all the content you’ll find in these rooms, whether they’re talks, demos, workshops, panel discussions etc. will be in real-time, all broadcast over a live Zoom link.
Hosted by the Community for the Community
Each Community Room will be overseen by Docker Captains and Community Leaders. They will be responsible for every aspect of the room, from the curation of content, to the management of the schedule, to the recruitment of the speakers, to the moderation of their room’s live chat.
There will be seven community rooms to choose from, each with one or Continue reading