Someone Has To Pay To Push The Bleeding Edge Of Systems
When you look at IBM, it is as if you are seeing many different instantiations of Big Blue across time playing out in the present, side by side. …
Someone Has To Pay To Push The Bleeding Edge Of Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
The Role of Enterprise Container Platforms
As container technology adoption continues to advance and mature, companies now recognize the importance of an enterprise container platform. More than just a runtime for applications, a container platform provides a complete management solution for securing and operationalizing applications in containers at scale over the entire software lifecycle.
While containers may have revolutionized the way developers package applications, container platforms are changing the way enterprises manage and secure both mission-critical legacy applications and microservices both on prem and across multiple clouds. Enterprises are beginning to see that container runtime and orchestration technologies alone don’t address these critical questions:
- Where did this application come from?
- Was the application built with company and/or industry best practices in mind?
- Has this application undergone a security review?
- Is my cluster performing as expected?
- If my application is failing or underperforming, where should I look?
- Will this environment run the same on the new hardware/cloud that we’re using?
- Can I use my existing infrastructure and/or tools with this container environment?
Leading Industry Analysts Highlight Container Platforms for Enterprise Adoption
For some time, there was a lot of confusion in the market between orchestration solutions and container platforms. But in 2018, we are seeing more alignment across major Continue reading
Now Open: DockerCon Europe Diversity Scholarship!
Over the last 3 years, Docker has provided over 75 financial scholarships to members of the Docker community, who are traditionally underrepresented, to attend DockerCon. By actively promoting diversity of all kinds, our goal is make DockerCon a safe place for all to learn, belong and collaborate.
With the continued support of Docker and one of our DockerCon scholarship sponsors, the Open Container Initiative (OCI), we are excited to announce the launch of the DockerCon Europe Diversity Scholarship Program. This year, we are increasing the number of scholarships we are granting to ensure attending DockerCon is an option for all.
Apply Now!
Deadline to Apply:
Friday, 26 October, 2018 at 5:00PM PST
Selection Process
A committee of Docker community members will review and select the scholarship recipients. Recipients will be notified by the week of 7 November 2018.
What’s included:
Full Access DockerCon Conference Pass
Please note, travel expenses are not covered under the scholarship and are the responsibility of the scholarship recipient.
Requirements
Must be able to attend DockerCon Europe 2018
Must be 18 years old or older to apply
Must be able to travel to Barcelona, Spain
We wanted to check back in with DockerCon Continue reading
Hands-on Learning Opportunities at DockerCon EU
The value of attending a conference is measured by how much you can learn and who you will meet. While DockerCon has you covered on both fronts. We know that everyone learns differently so the conference provides three options for you.
Workshops: Starting this year at DockerCon San Francisco, we introduced a track dedicated to workshops where technical experts deliver 2-hour deep dive sessions with hands-on tutorials to deepen your understanding of Docker technology, Kubernetes, Isito and solutions from our ecosystem partners. Included as part of your conference pass, you must pre-register for workshops to save your seat.
Hands on Labs: I instructor-led isn’t your thing, check out the self-paced Hands-On Labs. Also included with our conference pass, Hands-On Labs are available at any time throughout the conference. Drop in between sessions or anytime – grab a seat and launch a tutorial. Docker moderators will be on hand to help answer questions.
Training: In addition, you can add official Docker training courses to your DockerCon schedule at a discounted rate. Come early to Barcelona for a 2 day training course led by Docker authorized instructors and designed specifically for your role in using containers. Each course features a variety Continue reading
Red Hat Ansible Network Automation Updates
For this blog post I am going to cover the following topics:
- The httpapi connection plugin
- Support for Arista eAPI and Cisco NX-API
- net_get and net_put
- netconf_get, netconf_rpc and netconf_config
- cli_command and cli_config
The HTTPAPI connection plugin
Connection plugins allow Ansible to connect to target hosts so it can execute tasks on them. With the Ansible 2.5 release the network_cli connection plugin was introduced, removing the requirement for the provider parameter and standardizing network modules to allow playbooks to look, feel and operate just like they do on Linux hosts. This also allowed Red Hat Ansible Tower to Continue reading
Docker Certified Plugins From Networking Partners
The Docker Certified Technology Program is designed for ecosystem partners and customers to recognize Containers and Plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification gives organizations enterprises an easy way to run trusted software and components in containers on the Docker Enterprise container platform with support from both Docker and the publisher.
In this review, we’re looking at Docker Network Plugins. Networking has long been a vertical in the enterprise cloud and data center that has no shortage of complexity. Just as an overarching goal of Docker Enterprise is to make deploying and operating containers as simple as possible, the same goal applies to making Swarm networking as simple as possible. This powerful abstraction of complexity, is applicable regardless of whether in the customers data center or spread across multiple clouds. In some cases Docker Enterprise solves customer problems by shipping built-in plugins and in other scenarios the user’s needs are solved by innovations from the extensive Docker ecosystem. These solutions are validated by both Docker and the partner company and integrated into a seamless support pipeline that provide customers the world class support they have become accustomed to when working with Docker.
Check out the Continue reading
The release of Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.7
Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.7 is now available, featuring improved stability, speed and performance.
Preparing for the Future
Ansible Engine 2.7 continues to improve compatibility with modern versions of Python. As a result of changes to support newer versions of Python, support for running Ansible Engine with Python 2.6 has been removed. Management of systems with Python 2.6 installed is still possible, though the system Ansible Engine is running from must have Python 2.7 or Python 3.5 or later. This means if ansible-pull is being used the system running ansible-pull will need Python 2.7 or Python 3.5 or later.
A new file locking feature is designed to prevent race conditions when delegating to a central resource. For example, if a play calls for several hosts to write to a single file on a remote host it is likely multiple hosts would attempt to write to the file at the same time. This can now be done in Ansible Engine 2.7.
Deprecating use of features is often a challenging task. This task can be even more challenging when it involves multiple Ansible core modules. In Ansible Engine 2.7, several modules have Continue reading
Understanding Network IP Fragmentation
Overview
In this post, I’m going to talk about what IP fragmentation is, how it works and why it’s needed. And while learning that, we’re going to touch on subjects like OSI Layers / PDU / MTU / MRU and PMTUD.
Knowledge about them is required for truly understanding IP fragmentation process and troubleshooting network connection issues in general.
OSI model
This is basically a standardized model for network communications which breaks them into what’s called abstraction layers.
The original model consists of 7 layers: Physical, Data link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application .
Going up the OSI model hierarchy, layers stack up on top of one another.
Example 1:
In the reverse order, loading a secure web page would consist of:
HTTP(Application layer)TLS(Presentation Layer)TCP(Transport Layer)IP(Network Layer)Ethernet(Data Link Layer)Ethernet physical layer(Physical Layer)
Each layer would add an overhead to the final size (Yes, even the physical layer!)1
More info can be found Here.
PDU
In the OSI model, each layer consists of units. They are called Protocol Data Units.
Any transmission between 2 entities on a layer, would be be done Continue reading
Announcing the DockerCon EU 2018 Sessions
DockerCon EU 2018 sessions focus on how Docker works for you. From the latest in Docker technology, to how-tos for your developer and IT infrastructure and operations team, to customer stories on how they are transforming their business with Docker, this year’s program was revamped based on audience feedback. The result – we’ve doubled your favorite content! That’s right, we’ve expanded our popular Using Docker track into two customized tracks for those that are hands on with Docker technology on a daily basis – Using Docker for Developers and Using Docker for IT Infrastructure and Operations.
DockerCon is for Teams
DockerCon is better with friends and colleagues. In Barcelona we are introducing tracks specifically dedicated to developers and IT Infrastructure and Operations professionals. Combined with hands-on learning opportunities with Official Training, Workshops and Labs, there is no shortage of ways to level up on how to work with containers every day. So grab your colleagues and register together to take advantage of our DockerCon for Teams offer: Teams of 4 or more get 10% off their registration and 10 or more get 20% off.
Using Docker for Developers
This track is designed to cover the range of topics applicable Continue reading
Reboot Plugin for Linux in Ansible 2.7
Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible has always been possible, but was often tricky and error-prone. In Ansible 2.7, I am happy to say that rebooting Linux hosts with Ansible is now easier and can be done with a single task using the newly minted reboot plugin.
Some History
The win_reboot module was written by Matt Davis and included with Ansible 2.1. Rebooting Windows hosts is a much more common occurrence than rebooting Linux hosts. Necessity is the mother of invention, so it made sense that win_reboot appeared before the equivalent for Linux. And while less than elegant, it is possible to reboot Linux hosts using shell and wait_for or wait_for_connection[1].
Rebooting Linux systems with Ansible never felt right to me — much too error prone and finicky. It finally bugged me enough that I refactored win_reboot into reboot so Linux hosts could join the reboot party with their Windows counterparts.
Development Story
When I set out to make the reboot plugin[2], the goal was to create a common class that win_reboot (and potentially others) could easily subclass to override specific parts of the reboot process. I was also working in reverse, deconstructing win_reboot into a new Continue reading
Technology Short Take 105
Welcome to Technology Short Take #105! Here’s another collection of articles and blog posts about some of the common technologies that modern IT professionals will typically encounter. I hope that something I’ve included here proves to be useful for you.
Networking
- Jon Williams discusses deploying Anycast DNS using OpenBSD and BGP.
- Brian Boucheron provides a great article on how to inspect and debug Kubernetes network primitives. The information in this article is a great foundation upon which to build, in my opinion.
Servers/Hardware
- The big news in the hardware space recently was the article regarding the purported Chinese hardware supply chain attack. This has generated a lot of discussion. First, we have Amazon’s reply, in which they categorically deny all such claims. Apple’s response similarly denies the allegations in the report. Of the (innumerable) articles commenting on the hardware hack, this article by Joe FitzPatrick and this ErrataSec article caught my eye. Both articles point out the incredible difficulty of finding such a hardware hack, and point out that exploiting software vulnerabilities would probably be a much faster/easier way to accomplish the same goal. Will we ever know the truth as to whether this actually happened? Probably not.
Security
What We Heard About Containers and Windows Server App Migration at Microsoft Ignite
Ever since Microsoft CVP Erin Chapelle spoke about the future of Windows Containers at DockerCon earlier this year, there has been excitement around the general availability of Windows Server 2019. That announcement came last week at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Orlando.
Ignite was a tremendous opportunity for us to discuss the containerization journey with companies of all shapes and sizes. A central theme: what to do with large numbers of applications running today on Windows Server 2008, an operating system that will reach the end of its supported lifecycle in a mere 15 months.
Here are some common questions discussed last week at Ignite:
Q: What challenges do legacy Windows Server applications present?
A: Legacy applications have several challenges:
- Fragile dependencies between the OS, application and other components
- Lost knowledge when original development teams move on.
- The stickiness of legacy .NET applications, with 70 percent of .NET apps still running on Windows Server 2003 or 2008.
Q: Are Docker containers only a public cloud technology?
A: Containers are the fastest growing cloud enabling technology, and are often used to enable cloud migration initiatives. Jabil Circuit, GE Digital and Lindsay Corporation are among many customers that have used containers Continue reading
VMworld EMEA 2018 and Spousetivities
Registration is now open for Spousetivities at VMworld EMEA 2108 in Barcelona! Crystal just opened registration in the last day or so, and I wanted to help get the message out about these activities.
Here’s a quick peek at what Crystal has lined up for Spousetivities participants:
- A visit to the coastal village of Calella de Palafrugell, the village of Llafranc, and Pals (one of the most well-preserved medieval villages in all of Catalunya), along with wine in the Empordá region
- Tour of the Dali Museum
- Lunch and tour of Girona
- A lunch-time food tour
- A visit to the Collsera Natural Park and Mount Tibidabo, along with lunch at a 16th century stone farmhouse
For even more details, visit the Spousetivities site.
These activities look amazing. Even if you’ve been to Barcelona before, these unique activities and tours are not available to the public—they’re specially crafted specifically for Spousetivities participants.
Prices for all these activities are reduced thanks to Veeam’s sponsorship, and to help make things even more affordable there is a Full Week Pass that gives you access to all the activities at an additional discount.
These activities will almost certainly sell out, so register today!
Side note: Continue reading
Make your Ansible Playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable
Since starting my journey using Ansible in 2013, I've built Ansible Playbooks to automate many things: SaaS products, a cluster of Raspberry Pi's, a home automation system, even my own computers!
In the years since, I've learned a lot of tricks to help ease the maintenance burden for my work. It's important to me to have maintainable projects, because many of my projects—like Hosted Apache Solr—have been in operation for over a decade! If it's hard to maintain the project or it's hard to make major architecture changes, then I can lose customers to more nimble competitors, I can lose money, and—most importantly—I can lose my sanity!
I'm presenting a session at AnsibleFest Austin this year, Make your Ansible Playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable, and I thought I'd summarize some of the major themes here.
Stay Organized
I love photography and automation, and so I spend a lot of time building electronics projects that involve Raspberry Pis and cameras. Without the organization system I use (part of it pictured above), it would be very frustrating putting together the right components for my project.
Similarly, in Ansible, I like to have my tasks organized so I can compose them more Continue reading
Setting up the Kubernetes AWS Cloud Provider
The AWS cloud provider for Kubernetes enables a couple of key integration points for Kubernetes running on AWS; namely, dynamic provisioning of Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and dynamic provisioning/configuration of Elastic Load Balancers (ELBs) for exposing Kubernetes Service objects. Unfortunately, the documentation surrounding how to set up the AWS cloud provider with Kubernetes is woefully inadequate. This article is an attempt to help address that shortcoming.
More details are provided below, but at a high-level here’s what you’ll need to make the AWS cloud provider in Kubernetes work:
- The hostname of each node must match EC2’s private DNS entry for that node
- An IAM role and policy that EC2 instances can assume as an instance profile
- Kubernetes-specific tags applied to the AWS resources used by the cluster
- Particular command-line flags added to the Kubernetes API server, Kubernetes controller manager, and the Kubelet
Let’s dig into these requirements in a bit more detail.
Node Hostname
It’s important that the name of the Node object in Kubernetes matches the private DNS entry for the instance in EC2. You can use hostnamectl or a confiugration management tool (take your pick) to set the instance’s hostname to the FQDN that matches the EC2 Continue reading
Back By Popular Demand – Docker Pals Is Coming To Barcelona!
At DockerCon Copenhagen we launched the Docker Pals program in order to connect attendees and help them make the most out of their trip to DockerCon. Attending a conference by yourself can be intimidating and we don’t want anyone to feel that way at DockerCon! Pals get matched with a few others who are new (the “Pals”), and someone who knows their way around (the “Guide”) so that you will know someone before you arrive at the conference. So, DockerCon veterans, please consider signing up to be a Guide and help welcome those newer to DockerCon to the amazing Docker community. Participating gives you the opportunity to learn even more, grow an even bigger network, and have even more fun!
Here’s what Pals had to say:
“Docker Pals was an excellent opportunity to meet new Docker Captains and Community Leaders who are open to engaging with container enthusiasts of all skill levels, specialities and backgrounds. I would certainly take advantage of the program again, and volunteer to be a Guide next year.” – Jackie Liu
“I was able to learn and understand how Docker is used in real time and in production with my fellow Docker Pal.” – Continue reading
A Markdown-to-PDF Workflow on Linux
In May of last year I wrote about using a Makefile with Markdown documents, in which I described how I use make and a Makefile along with CLI tools like multimarkdown (the binary, not the format) and Pandoc. At that time, I’d figured out how to use combinations of the various CLI tools to create various formats from the source Markdown document. The one format I hadn’t gotten right at that time was PDF. Pandoc can create PDFs, but only if LaTeX is installed. This article describes a method I found that allows me to create PDFs from my Markdown documents without using LaTeX.
Two tools are involved in this new conversion process: Pandoc, which I’ve discussed on this site before; and wkhtmltopdf, a new tool I just recently discovered. Basically, I use Pandoc to go from Markdown (MultiMarkdown, specifically) to HTML, and then use wkhtmltopdf to generate a PDF file from the HTML.
The first step in the process is to use Pandoc to convert from Markdown to HTML, including the use of CSS to include custom formatting. The command looks something like this:
pandoc --from=markdown_mmd+yaml_metadata_block+smart --standalone \
--to=html -V css=/home/slowe/Documents/std-styles.css \
--output=<destination-html-filename> <source-md-filename>
This generates Continue reading
Docker Certified Storage Partners Review – Sept. 2018
The Docker Certified Technology Program is designed for ecosystem partners and customers to recognize containers and plugins that excel in quality, collaborative support and compliance. Docker Certification gives organizations an easy way to run trusted software and components in containers on the Docker Enterprise container platform with support from both Docker and the publisher.
In this review, we’re looking at Docker Volume Plugins. In any production Docker Enterprise deployment, it is important to have the ability to manage storage for persistent applications. While it is possible to use traditional SAN and NAS solutions directly with Docker Enterprise with Swarm orchestration, it is actually much easier and more convenient to manage volumes through the Docker CLI and management interfaces by specifying a Docker-native volume driver so users can manage volumes on demand.
Check out the latest certified Docker Volume Plugins that are now available from our partners on Docker Store:
- HPE Nimble Storage Docker Volume Plugin
- Nutanix DVP (Docker Volume Plug-in)
- Netapp Trident
- Hedvig Docker Volume Plugin
- Pure Storage Docker Volume Plugin
- NexentaEdge NFS Volume Plugin
Along with Docker Volume plugins, we also have partners with container-based storage solutions in Docker Store:
Learn More:
- Learn more about Docker Enterprise and get a free trial today
- Check out a Docker event near Continue reading
Large Scale Deployments Using Ansible
This has been the Ansible messaging since the journey began. As time has gone on, the definition of simple we’re talking about may have been misunderstood...
The Ansible simplicity is about being easy to understand, learn and share. It’s about people. The often peddled notion that “Ansible doesn’t scale past 500 hosts” is shadowed by the customers we have with over 100,000 nodes under management. But the idea that scale is purely about the number of hosts isn’t recognising the greater relevance. Scale is so much more, scale is about the context in your business.
What is scale?
Technological Scale
When it comes to IT, conclusions about ‘scale’ usually equate to numbers of something technical. A frequent customer ask might go something like "We need Ansible to scale to 70,000 hosts".
Once we look into that number though, the reality is no technical operation will happen across them all at once. The jeopardy to a business of this size is too great to chance a failure of every system. Operations at large scale happen piecemeal for safety reasons – rolling updates are not only a safer way to operate, we see the results faster.
Business function, geography, application and Continue reading
3 Ways Docker Customers Future-Proof Legacy Windows Server Applications
In 2018, why are we still talking about legacy Windows applications? Why are we holding onto Windows Servers that are a decade old? The simple answer — the applications on those servers still work, and they still serve a business purpose. But they can become a significant liability.
Many of our customers are containerizing legacy Windows 2003 and 2008 applications today with Docker Enterprise, making them portable to new Windows Server platforms and the cloud with no code changes. These three examples — Jabil Circuit, a bank, and GE Digital, showcase the depth of what you can do with Docker Enterprise to modernize legacy Windows applications.
Jabil Modernizes Legacy Windows Apps for Cloud Migration
Jabil, one of world’s most technologically advanced manufacturing solution providers with over 100 sites in 29 countries, has embarked on a digital journey to modernize their technology infrastructure. They have a “cloud-first” strategy that requires modernizing over 100 legacy .NET and Java applications, many of which are running on Windows 2008 and 2012.
They’ve deployed Docker Enterprise and windows containers to successfully migrate the applications from legacy Windows servers to Windows Server 2016 on Microsoft Azure cloud. Now that the first phase is complete, Jabil has Continue reading