Released: Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon]
Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Docker Desktop for Mac [Apple Silicon], continuing to support developers in our community with their choice of local development environments.
First, we want to say a big thank you to our community. The excitement you have shown about being able to run Docker Desktop on the new M1 chip has been tremendous and hugely motivating to us. Your engagement on testing builds and reporting problems has been invaluable. As soon as Apple announced the new M1 chip, you let us know on our public roadmap that this was a high priority for you, and it quickly became by far our most upvoted roadmap item ever. You also responded very positively to our previous blog posts.
After the M1 machines were publicly available, those of you on our developer preview program tested some very early builds. And then as we moved into public tech previews and release candidates, many more of you joined in with testing your enormous variety of use cases, and reporting bugs. In total we have had 45,000 downloads of the various preview builds, and 140 tickets raised on our public bug tracker, not to Continue reading
Automating ServiceNow with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
IT service management (ITSM) is a collection of policies and processes for the management and support of IT services. The main focus of ITSM is increasing the value of the customers’ service chain. But without the proper automation support, providing IT services can quickly become a major time-sink.
This is where the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow come into play. Ansible Automation (with some help from existing Ansible content) can automate just about any task, while the modules from this Certified Collection allow us to keep the ServiceNow information up to date.
This Collection was designed and developed by the XLAB Steampunk team in close collaboration with Red Hat Ansible, specifically keeping end-users in mind. ServiceNow modules have an intuitive user interface backed by a robust implementation, offering support for things Ansible users expect (e.g., check mode and change detection).
In this post, we will look at a few sample Ansible Playbooks that take care of essential tasks such as:
- Updating incidents, problems, and change requests
- Updating the ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB)
- Using the CMDB as an inventory source
Installing the Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow
Captain Take 5 – Nuno do Carmo
Docker Captains are select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others. “Docker Captains Take 5” is a regular blog series where we get a closer look at our Captains and ask them the same broad set of questions ranging from what their best Docker tip is to whether they prefer cats or dogs (personally, we like whales and turtles over here). Today, we’re interviewing Nuno do Carmo who has been a Docker Captain since 2019. He is a Sr System Analyst for a pharmaceutical company based in Switzerland and he is based in Montreux.
How/when did you first discover Docker?
Back in 2015, I was hanging with friends and we would meet once a week to check on technologies and we found out a training on Pluralsight, given by a certain Nigel Poulton, and we decided to “temporarily” download it, **cough**.
Both the training method from Nigel and the technology of Docker were an instant hit for us. We started to learn as hobbyists and fast forward, I guess I took it more at heart than my friends, haha.
What is your favorite Docker command?
`docker Continue reading
Making Firefox on Linux use Private Browsing by Default
While there are a couple different methods to make Firefox use private browsing by default (see this page for a couple methods), these methods essentially force private browsing and disable the ability to use “regular” (non-private) browsing. In this post, I’ll describe what I consider to be a better way of achieving this, at least on Linux.
It’s possible this method will also work on Windows, but I haven’t tested it. If anyone gets a chance to test it and let me know, I’ll update this post and credit you accordingly. Just hit me on Twitter and let me know what you’ve found in your testing. I’ve also only tested this on Fedora, but it should be the same or very similar for any distribution that uses GNOME.
GNOME uses the idea of “desktop files” (typically found in /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications) to enable the launching of applications via the Activities screen or other mechanisms. (For more information on desktop files, see here.) These desktop files specify where the executable is found, what command-line parameters to use, what icon to use, what name the application should go by, etc. Desktop files also allow application developers or users Continue reading
Automating a RHEL 8 Installation Using the VMware REST Ansible Collection
Managing virtual machines in an IT infrastructure is often a common task, specifically VMware virtualization technology has been around for over 20 years. VMware administrators spend a lot of their time in automating the creation, management, and removal of virtual instances that contain various operating systems. One operating system that often resides on VMware infrastructure is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
With the introduction of VMware REST APIs, we recently announced the initial release of the vmware.vmware_rest Collection, for production use. As opposed to the community.vmware Collection, the vmware.vmware_rest Collection is based on next generation VMware REST APIs. This new Collection no longer requires any third party Python bindings to communicate with VMware infrastructure. A large part of the new Collection that has been introduced is support for automating virtual machine operations.
In this blog post I will show you how VMware users can automate the installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) using the vmware.vmware_rest.vcenter_vm module and a valid Kickstart file.
Scenario requirements
For this scenario, we will assume following requirements:
- vCenter 7.0.1 or latest with at least one ESXi
- RHEL 8 installation DVD
- Ansible
- vmware.vmware_rest Continue reading
Changing How Updates Work with Docker Desktop 3.3
Today we are pleased to announce the release of Docker Desktop 3.3.
We’ve been listening to your feedback on our Public Roadmap and we are consistently asked for three things: smaller downloads, more flexible installation options, and more frequent feature releases, bug fixes, and security updates.
We also heard from our community that the smaller updates are appreciated, requiring immediate installation is not convenient, and automatic background downloads are problematic for developers on constrained or metered bandwidth.
We’ve heard you and are changing how updates to Docker Desktop work, while still maintaining the ability to provide you with smaller, faster updates. We are also providing additional flexibility to developers with Pro or Team subscriptions.
Flexibility for Updates
With Docker Desktop 3.3, when a new update to Docker Desktop is available, it will no longer be automatically downloaded and installed on your next restart. You can now choose when to start the download and installation process.
To encourage developers to stay up to date, we have built in increasingly persistent reminders after an update has become available.
If you use Docker Desktop at work you may need to skip a specific update. For this reason, Pro or Team subscription Continue reading
Get Involved with Docker
Every day, hundreds of passionate Docker users around the world contribute to Docker. Whether you are just getting started or are an expert in your field, there are many ways to get involved and start contributing to Docker. If you’re into technical writing, you can easily publish and/or edit articles in docs.docker.com. If you’re more into code contribution, there are dozens of open source Docker projects you can dive into. Or if you’re just interested in sharing knowledge and spreading Docker goodness, you can organize a local meetup or a virtual workshop on our community events page.
There are literally countless ways one can contribute to Docker. This makes it sometimes a bit difficult to find the right project or activity that maps to your interests and level of Docker expertise. That’s why we’ve been working to make it easier for anyone to learn more about ways to contribute and find the right project or activity. To this end, we created a community-driven website that aims to make it easier than ever to navigate the many different contribution opportunities that exist at Docker, and ultimately, to find the right contribution pathway to get started.
Getting Started With BGP Global Resource Modules
With the increasing size and complexity of modern enterprise networks, the demand on simplifying the networks management becomes more intense. The introduction of resources modules with Ansible Engine 2.9 provide a path to users to ease the network management, especially across multiple different product vendors.
In the past, we’ve already covered resource modules for OSPF management and for ACLs. However, simplifying network management is not limited to rather local network setups or intra domain routing only. “Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a standardized exterior gateway protocol designed to exchange routing and reachability information between autonomous systems (AS) on the internet. The protocol is often classified as a path vector protocol but is sometimes also classed as a distance-vector routing protocol.” It is used in larger network setups, as the NetworkWorld so aptly observes:
BGP has been called the glue of the Internet and the postal service of the internet. One comparison likens BGP to GPS applications on mobile phones.
Managing BGP manually for a network device can be a very difficult and tedious task, and more often this needs to be performed carefully, as the manual process is more prone to human error.
This blog post goes Continue reading
Technology Short Take 139
Welcome to Technology Short Take #139! This Technology Short Take is a bit heavy on cloud, OS, and programming topics, but there should be enough other interesting links to be useful to plenty of folks. (At least, I hope that’s the case!) Now, let’s get on to the content!
Networking
- Tony Mackay has a tutorial showing how to use Traefik to rate-limit requests to a WordPress instance.
- Ali Al Idrees has a post on using NSX ALB (formerly Avi Networks) with Kubernetes clusters in a vSphere with Tanzu environment.
- This post provides some examples of shared control planes (and thus shared failure domains) within networking.
- In this post, Jakub Sitnicki digs way deep into the Linux kernel to uncover the answer to the question, “Why are there no entries in the conntrack table for SYN packets dropped by the firewall?” Get ready to get nerdy!
- This article on eBPF and Isovalent (the company behind the Cilium CNI plugin for Kubernetes) has some statements with which I agree, and some that don’t make sense to me. For example, I agree with the statement that the “impact eBPF will have on networking, security and observability will be widespread”. However, Continue reading
Using WireGuard on macOS
A short while ago I published a post on setting up WireGuard for AWS VPC access. In that post, I focused on the use of Linux on both the server side (on an EC2 instance in your AWS VPC) as well as on the client side (using the GNOME Network Manager interface). However, WireGuard is not limited to Linux, and I recently configured one of my macOS systems to take advantage of this WireGuard infrastructure for access to the private subnets in my AWS VPC. In this post, I’ll walk readers through configuring macOS to use WireGuard.
The first step is installing WireGuard on macOS. This is remarkably easy; just go to the App Store and install the WireGuard app for macOS. (Hopefully this link will take you directly there if you’re on a macOS-based system.)
Once the app is installed, the next step is to configure the WireGuard tunnels. I found this to be a bit confusing at first, but only because I wasn’t clear on the relationship between the WireGuard app and the Network pane in System Preferences. In this case, you need to use the WireGuard app to create the tunnels, which will show up as Continue reading
Compiling Containers – Dockerfiles, LLVM and BuildKit
Today we’re featuring a blog from Adam Gordon Bell at Earthly who writes about how BuildKit, a technology developed by Docker and the community, works and how to write a simple frontend. Earthly uses BuildKit in their product.
Introduction
How are containers made? Usually, from a series of statements like `RUN`, `FROM`, and `COPY`, which are put into a Dockerfile and built. But how are those commands turned into a container image and then a running container? We can build up an intuition for how this works by understanding the phases involved and creating a container image ourselves. We will create an image programmatically and then develop a trivial syntactic frontend and use it to build an image.
On `docker build`
We can create container images in several ways. We can use Buildpacks, we can use build tools like Bazel or sbt, but by far, the most common way images are built is using `docker build` with a Dockerfile. The familiar base images Alpine, Ubuntu, and Debian are all created this way.
Here is an example Dockerfile:
FROM alpine
COPY README.md README.md
RUN echo "standard docker build" > /built.txt"We will be using Continue reading
A Birthday Challenge as Docker Turns 8
Time flies. Eight years ago Docker was introduced to the world and forever changed the way applications are developed. We have enjoyed watching developers from all walks of life and from every corner of the globe bring their ideas to life using our technology.
As is our tradition in the Docker community, and as announced during our last Community All-Hands, we are celebrating Docker’s big day with a birthday challenge where Docker users are encouraged to learn some of our Docker Captain’s favorite tips + tricks by completing 8 hands-on interactive exercises. Unlike last year’s challenge, this year as you complete an exercise you not only earn badges but you also earn points based on speed and accuracy which will be displayed on a leaderboard organised by individual score, country score and Captain score.
The challenge is on for the next month and we will announce the winners and award special prizes to the top three individual scores.
So let’s celebrate 8 years of Docker and let the challenge begin!
The post A Birthday Challenge as Docker Turns 8 appeared first on Docker Blog.
DockerCon LIVE 2021 Registration is Now Open
We’re excited to announce that registration for DockerCon LIVE 2021 is now officially open!
Taking place on Thursday, May 27th, the one day virtual event brings together all of the application development technology, skills, tools and people to help you build, share and run applications faster. And the best part? It’s FREE.
Attendees will:
- Learn about the latest Docker features and technology updates
- See live, on-demand technical demos
- Talk to a panel of experts and industry leaders who can help you build better apps
- Connect with peers and network with a thriving, vibrant community of developers
- Share experiences with other developers about creating leading edge cloud native applications for any cloud environment
- Attend tutorials on how to get started with containers and how to use multiple languages
- Get best practices tips and insights from innovative organizations that are building next generation applications with Docker
- Hear about what’s new with tools and partner integration
- Participate in live sessions with Docker Captains
Be in on the Action
Our Call For Presentations is open until April 1st so there’s still time for you to submit a talk. If you have any questions about our CFP or the the conference in general, Continue reading
A Tale of Two Network Automation Surveys
The 2020 results of the NetDevOps Survey are out! This was the third time the survey was conducted and was targeted to the network automation community. But first, a huge shout out to the team that led this effort again (Damien Garros and Francois Caen). The survey was 100% community-driven, and I thank them for allowing me to be a part of the team, and to provide feedback to existing and new questions.
This survey is a good representation of how network operators and network engineers are utilizing automation to get their jobs done, but largely without management buy-in or a proactive automation strategy. This blog is largely my hot take on the results, as seen through the lens of my history at Red Hat as an Ansible Product Manager helping to get network automation as an official commercial use case off the ground. I’m going to compare and contrast the survey questions and results between the most recent NetDevOps survey and the Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Enterprise Network Automation for 2020 and Beyond results that Red Hat sponsored back in 2019.
Here are the main ideas I gleaned:
- Ansible continues to be the de-facto network (and more) automation language.
Continue reading
Advanced Image Management in Docker Hub
We are excited to announce the latest feature for Docker Pro and Team users, our new Advanced Image Management Dashboard available on Docker Hub. The new dashboard provides developers with a new level of access to all of the content you have stored in Docker Hub providing you with more fine grained control over removing old content and exploring old versions of pushed images.
Historically in Docker Hub we have had visibility into the latest version of a tag that a user has pushed, but what has been very hard to see or even understand is what happened to all of those old things that you pushed. When you push an image to Docker Hub you are pushing a manifest, a list of all of the layers of your image, and the layers themselves.
When you are updating an existing tag, only the new layers will be pushed along with the new manifest which references these layers. This new manifest will be given the tag you specify when you push, such as bengotch/simplewhale:latest. But this does mean that all of those old manifests which point at the previous layers that made up your image are removed from Hub. These Continue reading
Adding a MachineHealthCheck using Kustomize
MachineHealthChecks are a powerful feature in the Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI), and something I played around with not too long ago on TGIK 143. Recently, I was helping to document the use of kustomize with Cluster API for inclusion in the upstream CAPI documentation, and I learned a simple trick with kustomize that I’d apparently overlooked in the past. If you’ve used kustomize for any great length of time you probably already know and have used the functionality I’ll describe in this post, but if you’re new to kustomize or, like me, a user of kustomize that hasn’t had time to dig into all of its functionality, then read on and see how you can use kustomize to add a MachineHealthCheck to a CAPI workload cluster.
If you’re not familiar with kustomize, then reading my introduction to kustomize may be useful before continuing on with the rest of this article.
In this use case—adding a MachineHealthCheck to an workload cluster in CAPI—I’ll work from the assumption that you have a “base” CAPI workload cluster definition (perhaps one you’ve generated using clusterctl config cluster). In the directory where this workload cluster manifest exists, you’d need to add a kustomization. Continue reading
Docker Community All Hands Recap
We are sharing a recap of last week’s second quarterly Community All-Hands and the feedback we got from the community.
The Community All-Hands deepen our engagement with the Docker community and bring users, contributors and staff together on a quarterly basis. It is an opportunity for the community to get updates on what we’re working on and align on priorities for the year. It also provides a live forum for the community to engage and ask questions directly to Docker’s executive and community leadership.
In December, we wrote that we wanted to build on the feedback we got after our first Community All-Hands and that we are committed to providing more content, a longer format and make it more interactive for attendees. To this end, we chose to extend the event by 2 hours and include parallel tracks with more speakers and a mix of live keynotes, workshops, lightning talks and regional content. We also picked the Tulu.la video platform to host the event, leveraging their awesome innovative features (eg. integrated chat, multi-casting, WebRTC).
These improvements paid off in an impressive way: we had close to 3,000 unique attendees (including Youtube-live stream viewers), almost tripling the number of Continue reading
Announcing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Certified Ansible Collection
Today we're thrilled to announce that the RHEL System Roles Collection is now certified with Ansible Automation Platform and is being delivered to organizations through Ansible Automation Hub. Starting with the forthcoming RHEL 8.4, this means that the system roles Collection is immediately available under technology preview support and planned to be fully supported by both RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform product support experts.
What is it, why use it
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the world's leading enterprise Linux platform. System administrators expect features and improvements to deliver on the agility demanded by their end users. In order to abstract away tedious, error-prone manual administration and configuration, RHEL system roles offer a path towards a repeatable and predictable operating system configuration. Under the hood, these Ansible roles and modules are now packaged, provided via an Ansible Content Collection.
For customers with both RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions, this means that the automation platform gains new certified content to predictably drive the configuration of RHEL, wherever it may be deployed, to ensure the stability that Red Hat customers expect from an enterprise Linux operating system. Finally, continuing the commitment for upstream community development and Continue reading
Docker and CNCF Join Forces for “Container Garage” Event Series
At Docker, we’re constantly trying to engage and connect with developer communities around the world to explore ways we can cross pollinate ideas, share, and learn from each other. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Docker and the CNCF are joining forces to run a community-led event series called “Container Garage”, covering all things containers and focusing on a particular theme each time (eg. “runtime”, “images”, “security” etc…). The aim of the event is to engage our respective communities and foster closer collaboration.
To this end Docker Captains and CNCF Ambassadors are taking the lead with the planning and execution of the event, working in lock-step to curate excellent content and recruit amazing speakers for engaging talks, demos, and live panels.
The kick-off event will be on Thursday April 1st around the theme of container runtimes. The agenda is structured as follows:
2pm – 4pm CET : Talks & Demos
4pm – 4:15 CET : Break
4:15pm – 5pm CET : Live panel discussion
5pm – 5:15 : Break
5pm – 7pm CET : Talks & Demos
Again, the first event will be held on April 1st on the topic of container runtimes.
You can register for free Continue reading
Docker Series B: More Fuel To Help Dev Teams Get Ship Done
Today we’re excited and humbled to announce Docker’s Series B raise of $23 million to accelerate our mission of delivering tools development teams love to quickly take their ideas from code to cloud. The round was led by Tribe Capital with participation from our existing investors, Benchmark and Insight Partners. Arjun Sethi, Tribe co-founder and partner, will join the Docker board.
This would not have been possible without the Docker team: Thank you for giving each other your best, every day, despite the disruptions of the refocusing, the pandemic, the overnight switch to work-from-home, and so much more. We also thank our developer community of users, contributors, customers, partners, and Docker Captains – your enthusiastic engagement throughout this past year was invaluable.
Hit Refresh
Tribe sees in Docker what we saw in November 2019 when we refocused the company: the opportunity to build on the bottoms-up developer love of the Docker experience and provide a collaborative app development platform for development teams to accelerate getting their ideas from code to cloud. And that’s just what we did.
Key inputs to Tribe’s investment decision were our results this last year, which included attracting 80,000 developer participants to DockerCon 2020, adding Continue reading