Review: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

As part of the transition into my new role at Heptio (see here for more information), I had to select a new corporate laptop. Given that my last attempt at running Linux full-time was thwarted due primarily to work-specific collaboration issues that would no longer apply (see here), and given that other members of my team (the Field Engineering team) are also running Linux full-time, I thought I’d give it another go. Accordingly, I’ve started working on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (5th generation). Here are my thoughts on this laptop.

This is now my second non-Apple laptop in the last year. My previous non-Apple laptop, a Dell Latitude E7370, was a pretty decent laptop (see my review). As good as the E7370 was, though, the X1 Carbon is better.

The X1 Carbon features a dual-core i7 7500U CPU, which (subjectively, anyway) outperforms the mobile CPU in the E7370. This makes the X1 Carbon feel quite snappy and responsive. CPU performance was an issue for me with the Dell—it didn’t take much to tax that mobile CPU. I haven’t seen that issue so far with the X1 Carbon. Coupled with 16GB of RAM, the X1 Carbon is no Continue reading

Docker Birthday #5: Thank you Docker Community! 

Last month, Docker turned five! In celebration of this milestone, we turned the spotlight on our amazing global community of customers, users, Community Leaders, Captains, mentors, partners and sponsors, and asked them to reflect on their Docker learning journey. Everyone came together to celebrate how far they had come, think about where they would like to go and take that next step towards reaching their goal.

We had a lot of fun during the #dockerbday with the Quebec #Docker community! Thanks to @ingeno for sponsoring the event, @tnazare for the cake and for being an awesome mentor!  #dockerselfie #DockerQC pic.twitter.com/YZZNkWfWjq

— Julien Maitrehenry (@jmaitrehenry) March 23, 2018

We invite you to do the same. Whether you just want to test the waters, or want to dive right in, there are a variety of ways for you to take the next step on your Docker journey:

Just getting started and want to learn the basics? Check out the Play with Docker Classroom and work through our self paced labs to learn about containers and the Docker platform.

Want to learn about the latest update to Docker Enterprise Edition ? Join Docker and thousands of your peers for the Docker Continue reading

It’s Back… The Contribute and Collaborate track returns to DockerCon 2018

A significant number of Docker early adopters, advanced container users and Open Source lovers come to DockerCon to contribute to open source projects and collaborate on technical system implementations. Last year, these activities were taking place at the Moby Summit scheduled on the last day of the conference. Listening to feedback from attendees who expressed interest in participating in such activities earlier in the week, we’ve decided to bring back the Contribute & Collaborate track to the main conference days!

The goal of this track is to raise awareness and educate users around the upstream components of the Docker Platform, provide a path for new contributors and unleash new opportunities for innovation and collaboration within the broader Cloud Native and Open Source communities.

This track is organized in 4 half days (one for each of the categories below). Each will start by a series of lightning talks during which maintainers will be introducing their projects and doing a brief demo. We’ll then break into smaller groups for roundtables and informal, interactive Birds-of-a-Feather discussions with maintainers. This time will be a great opportunity to collaborate with peers who share the same interest, ask questions to maintainers, get insights into project roadmaps Continue reading

Ansible 2.5: LAUNCH AN Azure CONTAINER INSTANCE

Special thanks to Kylie Liang from the Microsoft Azure DevEx team for giving us a closer look at one of the new Azure module features.

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Launch an Azure Container Instance 

For this blog entry, we wanted to share a step by step guide to using the Azure Container Instance module that has been included in Ansible 2.5.

The Container Instance service is a PaaS offering on Azure that is designed to let users run containers without managing any of the underlying infrastructure. The Ansible Azure Container Instance module allows users to create, update and delete an Azure Container Instance.

Getting Started

For the purposes of this blog, we’ll assume that you are new to Azure and Ansible and want to automate the Container Instance service. This tutorial will guide you through automating the following steps:

• Install Ansible and Docker
• Set up credentials for your Azure modules
• Create an Continue reading

Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers Part 5

Moving a monolithic application to a modern cloud architecture can be difficult and often result in a greenfield development effort. However, it is possible to move towards a cloud architecture using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) with no code changes and gain portability, security and efficiency in the process.

To conclude the series In part 5, I use the message service’s REST endpoint to replace one part of the application UI with a Javascript client. The original application client UI was written in Java Server Pages (JSP) so that any UI changes required the application to be recompiled and redeployed. I can use modern web tools and frameworks such as React.js to write a new client interface. I’ll build the new client using a multi-stage build and deploy it by adding the container to the Docker Compose file. I’ll also show how to deploy the entire application from your development to Docker EE to make it available for testing.

Modernizing Java Apps for Developers shows how to take an existing Java N-tier application and run it in containers using the Docker platform to modernize the architecture. The source code for each part of this series is available on github and Continue reading

Docker Registry API to be standardized in OCI

We are excited to announce that the Docker Registry HTTP API V2 specification will be adopted in the Open Container Initiative (OCI), the organization under the Linux Foundation that provides the standards that fuel the containerization industry. The Docker team is proud to see another aspect of our technology stack become a de-facto standard. As we’ve done with our image format, we are happy to formally share and collaborate with the container ecosystem as part of the OCI community. Our distribution protocol is the underpinning of all container registries on the market and is so robust that it is leveraged over a billion times every two weeks as container content is distributed across the globe.

What does this protocol do?

Putting the protocol into perspective, part of the core functionality of Docker is the ability to push and pull images. From the first “Hello, World” moment, this concept is introduced to every user and is a large part of the Docker experience. While we normally sit back in our armchairs and marvel at this magical occurence, the amount of design and consideration that has gone into that simple capability can easily be overlooked.

When Docker was first released, the team Continue reading

Now Open: DockerCon US Diversity Scholarship!

DockerCon is a hub for the IT industry , bringing together members from all parts of our growing ecosystem and  global community. By actively promoting inclusivity, our goal is to make DockerCon a safe place for everyone to learn, belong and collaborate. With the support of Docker and our DockerCon scholarship sponsor, the Open Container Initiative (OCI), we are excited to announce the launch of this year’s DockerCon Diversity Scholarship Program to provide members of the Docker community, who are traditionally underrepresented, a financial scholarship to attend DockerCon US 2018. 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:

Wednesday, April 25, 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 May 7, 2018

What’s included:

Full Access DockerCon Conference Pass

Requirements

Must be able to attend DockerCon US 2018

Must be 18 years old or older to apply

Learn more about the DockerCon Diversity Scholarship here. 

Have questions or concerns? Reach us at [email protected]

#DockerCon US Diversity Scholarship is now open! Learn more and Continue reading

Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers Part 4

Moving a monolithic application to a modern cloud architecture can be difficult and often result in a greenfield development effort. However, it is possible to move towards a cloud architecture using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE)  with no code changes and gain portability, security and efficiency in the process.

Part 4 takes advantage of the messaging service I added in part 3. In this installment, I’ll add self service analytics powered by the open source Elasticsearch / Kibana stack. The reporting database and analytics UI run in containers and the worker is updated to also store data in Elasticsearch. The Docker platform supports adding new components to a running deployment without shutting down the application containers that are currently running. You’ll learn how Docker lets you add new capabilities to the application with zero downtime in production.

Docker MTA Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers
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To learn more about Docker for Java Developers:

• Follow the Docker for Java Developer blog and videos series
• Check out the Docker MTA program
• Sign up for upcoming webinars

The post Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers Part 4 appeared first on Docker Blog.

Webinar Recap: The Docker Platform on Windows – from 101 to Modernizing .NET Apps

Our live Docker webinars are always hugely popular. Last month we hosted a session on Docker and Windows containers, covering everything from the basics to how you can use the  Docker platform (Docker Enterprise Edition and Docker Desktop)  to modernize existing .NET apps and move them to the cloud.

The recording is available now – it clocks in at 60 minutes and has lots of demos showing you how to build and run Windows applications in containers with Docker for Windows:

The sample code, Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files for all the demos are here on GitHub.

In fact there were so many demos, I ran out of time for the Q&A part – so here are the unanswered questions we had from viewers:

Q. Are there any best practices or tutorial to architect sql databases in containers? What about data persistence, database references etc? How can we use SSDT with containers?

SQL Server running in a container is just like any remote SQL Server – you can connect with SSDT or Visual Studio or VS Code or any SQL client. There’s a good SQL Server in Docker tutorial on GitHub which walks through the build and deployment process with containers, and Continue reading

Improved Docker Container Integration with Java 10

Many applications that run in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), including data services such as Apache Spark and Kafka and traditional enterprise applications, are run in containers. Until recently, running the JVM in a container presented problems with memory and cpu sizing and usage that led to performance loss. This was because Java didn’t recognize that it was running in a container. With the release of Java 10, the JVM now recognizes constraints set by container control groups (cgroups). Both memory and cpu constraints can be used manage Java applications directly in containers, these include:

• adhering to memory limits set in the container
• setting available cpus in the container
• setting cpu constraints in the container

Java 10 improvements are realized in both Docker for Mac or Windows and Docker Enterprise Edition environments.

Container Memory Limits

Until Java 9 the JVM did not recognize memory or cpu limits set by the container using flags. In Java 10, memory limits are automatically recognized and enforced.

Java defines a server class machine as having 2 CPUs and 2GB of memory and the default heap size is ¼ of the physical memory. For example, a Docker Enterprise Edition installation has 2GB of memory and Continue reading

GETTING STARTED: ANSIBLE TOWER’S API

Welcome to another entry in the Getting Started series. The API (Application Programming Interface) or, as I like to refer to it, the Magical Land of Automation Information, can be used in quite a few ways. In this Getting Started post, we will be discussing Red Hat Ansible Tower’s API and how you can use it to extract information to utilize in your playbooks and other tools.

The idea for this blog post came about when David Federlein was developing a new Ansible Tower demo and presentation. I will be making references to that codebase, which you can follow along with throughout this post. Please note that this demo utilizes Vagrant and VirtualBox so you’ll need to have those applications installed if you would like to stand up the demo yourself.

Ansible Tower’s API

Ansible Tower’s API is fully browsable. You can navigate to your instance’s REST API by typing this into your browser: http://<Tower server name>/api/v2. Once there, you can click any of the listed links and view the current objects loaded for that particular attribute in Ansible Tower. Everything you can do in Ansible Tower's UI can be done from the API; you can also use it Continue reading

The Future is Containerized

Last week I announced my departure from VMware, and my intention to step away from VMware’s products and platforms to focus on a new technology area moving forward. Today marks the “official” start of a journey that’s been building for a couple years, a journey that will take me into a future that’s containerized. That journey starts in Seattle, Washington.

Why Seattle, Washington? Because that’s where Heptio is based, and because today I am joining Heptio as a senior member of the field engineering team to help drive the adoption of Kubernetes across the industry. Only a couple of folks guessed that I was headed to Heptio. If you were one of those folks, you guessed correctly!

Two questions are probably rolling around in your head right now:

1. Why Kubernetes?
2. Why Heptio?

Good questions!

It’s clear to me that containers will have a significant impact on how we as IT professionals will develop, deploy, upgrade, and manage applications. It’s also clear to me that when it comes to orchestrating containers, Kubernetes is the clear leader. So, if I accept that containers are going to be a significant part of IT moving forward, then it logically follows that Kubernetes is Continue reading

Technology Short Take 97

Welcome to Technology Short Take 97! This Tech Short Take marks the end of an era (sort of); it’s the last Tech Short Take published while I’m a VMware employee (today is my last day; see here for more details). But enough about me—let’s talk some tech! This Short Take may be a bit longer than some, so buckle up.

Networking

• Vadim Eisenberg has two articles that describe how to integrate external services into an Istio service mesh. The first article covers integrating external web services; the second article discusses consuming external TCP services.
• Matt Oswalt tackles the topic of unit testing (specifically with regard to network automation) with a post on unit testing JunOS with JSNAPy.
• This is an older post (more than 2 years old), but as far as I can tell the concepts are still quite applicable. Sean Howard talks about using the NSX Service Compose to create a more elegant ruleset for enforcing security policy.
• Jérôme Petazzoni test drives AppSwitch, the “network stack from the future.” I also recently received an invitation to give AppSwitch a look, so stay tuned for my feedback as well.
• Chris Young shares some details on a little Continue reading

Au revoir

Today I’m announcing my departure from Docker, the company I helped create ten years ago and have been building ever since. A founder’s departure is usually seen as a dramatic event. Sadly, I must report that reality is far less exciting in this case. I’ve had many roles at Docker over the years, and today I have a new, final one – as an active board member, a major shareholder and, I expect, a high maintenance Docker user. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over my own ideas, I am rediscovering the joys of putting myself at the service of others – my friends, my family, and the brilliant entrepreneurs I’ve been lucky enough to advise and invest in over the years. Over the coming months I plan to use my experience to help them in any way I can.

This transition is simply another chapter in a long story of change, growth, hard work… and a lot of luck.

Ten years ago, I quit my job, returned to live with my mother in Paris and, together with my friends Kamel Founadi and Sebastien Pahl, started a company called Continue reading

Video Series: Modernizing Java Apps for Developers Part 3

Moving a monolithic application to a modern cloud architecture can be difficult and often result in a greenfield development effort. However, it is possible to move towards a cloud architecture using Docker Enterprise Edition with no code changes and gain choice , security and operational agility in the process.

Part 3 of the series begins the modernization process. I’ll take one aspect of the current application and break it out into a microservice. As written, the application writes to the database directly, but direct writes to the database can easily overwhelm the application by a large number of requests.

One solution is to implement a messaging queue. As in the part 2, I’ll follow several guidelines:

1. Leave existing code in place.
2. Design the new code as a separate and reusable application
3. Deploy the microservice locally using Docker Enterise Edition
4. Test the code

In this part of the modernization process, I add a message queue comprised of a REST interface that writes to a Redis database. The user data is held in Redis until it’s requested by a worker service that does the write to the database. The message queue uses Spring Boot to implement both the REST interface and the Redis database functions. Continue reading

Infoblox Integration in Ansible 2.5

The Ansible 2.5 open source project release includes the following Infoblox Network Identity Operating System (NIOS) enablement:

• Five modules
• A lookup plugin (for querying Infoblox NIOS objects)
• A dynamic inventory script

For network professionals, this means that existing networking Ansible Playbooks can utilize existing Infoblox infrastructure for IP Address Management (IPAM), using Infoblox for tracking inventory and more. For more information on Infoblox terminology, documentation and examples, refer to the Infoblox website

Let’s elaborate on each of these Ansible 2.5 additions. All of the following examples (and many more) are provided in the network automation community project, under the infoblox_ansible Github repo. The integrations for Ansible require that the control node (where Ansible is being executed from) have the infoblox-client installed. It can be found here and installed with pip issuing the pip install infoblox-client command.

Ansible Infoblox Modules

There are five new modules included with Ansible 2.5. They can be currently found in the development branch of the documentation:

• nios_host_record - configure host records
• nios_network - configure networking objects
• nios_network_view - configure networking views
• nios_dns_view - configure DNS views
• nios_zone - configure DNS zones

Here is an example playbook on configuring a IPv4 network using the Continue reading

Time to Evolve

I first started getting into VMware around 2003, possibly earlier (I can’t recall exactly when it was). I remember thinking that VMware’s impact on the industry was going to be significant, and I wanted to be part of this industry change. I was right—virtualization like what VMware offers has fundamentally changed the industry. However, just as technology evolves, technology careers must evolve as well. Specifically, my technology career must change and grow. It’s time to evolve.

This need to evolve has been building for a couple years. You’ve probably observed that the amount of VMware-centric content produced here on the site has slowly been replaced by topics like Linux, Docker, Vagrant, Terraform, AWS, Azure, and others. These topics represent where I think my next period of growth and change resides, and after a couple years of slow growth in these areas it’s now time to “put the pedal to the metal” and accelerate things.

As of this coming Friday, March 30, 2018, I will be leaving VMware after a little over 5 years with the company. My time with VMware (as an employee) has been an amazing adventure. I’m thankful to Brad Hedlund for his Continue reading

Ansible 2.5: Traveling space and time

Welcome to another Ansible release! Version 2.5–“Kashmir”–has a lot of great stuff to play around with, and we're excited to get it in your hands so you can try it out.

Some of the items in this release have been covered in depth in previous Feature Spotlights: AWS EC2 Dynamic inventory plugin, the new Loop keyword, and the all-new ec2_instance module. But those are just appetizers for all of the new things that are included in this release.

Fact Namespacing

In 2.5, we are introducing fact namespacing, which makes Ansible facts available under the ansible_facts namespace (i.e. ansible_facts.os_distribution) without the ansible_ prefix.

Facts will continue to be added into the main namespace directly, but there is now a configuration boolean to enable this. Today, it’s ”On” by default, in a future release, we’ll switch that to “Off”.

Module Blacklisting

We have added a configuration file that enables administrators to filter modules that should be excluded from being used in playbook runs. Operationally, this ensures administrators have more control over which Ansible Modules are approved for use.

New magic vars

Magic vars are variables that Ansible provides to playbook runs without having to be requested. Continue reading

5 years later, Docker has come a long way

The evolution of Docker: From introducing a container runtime to building an enterprise-ready container platform

Back in March 2013, Docker was introduced publicly for the first time during Docker founder, Solomon Hykes’ lightning talk at PyCon. Since that moment in 2013, Docker has evolved in conjunction with the needs of users and customers to drive innovation around security, orchestration, networking and more. From building out advanced security features across the software supply chain and offering the choice of both Swarm and Kubernetes, to developing Docker for Mac/Windows and the Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) container platform, Docker has come a long way. Now at the age of five, Docker has millions of users and over 450 commercial customers – including hundreds of the world’s largest companies – that rely on Docker EE to power their digital and multi-cloud initiatives.

The history of Docker has shaped where we are today and as we celebrate our 5th birthday this week, we take a look back at the journey that lead us here.

Following the enthusiastic reception at PyCon 2013, Docker’s image format and container runtime quickly emerged as the de facto standard and building block for the community, customers and the broader industry. The Continue reading

Interop ITX, Dell Technologies World, and Spousetivities

Spousetivities will be present at two additional events this year—in fact, these events are only about 6 weeks away! Both Dell Technologies World and Interop ITX are in Las Vegas the last week of April (both starting April 30), and Spousetivities is running events for both conferences.

<aside>In case you’re wondering why I blog about Spousetivities, it’s not only because my wife runs it (seriously). It’s primarily because I’m committed to supporting families, marriages, and relationships in the IT industry. IT companies ask a lot of their employees—often asking employees to give up evenings and/or weekends, or setting unfair expectations on employee responsiveness via email/Slack/IM during off-hours—so a program that enables spouses and/or significant others to join IT employees during a conference helps provide a little bit of balance, in my view.</aside>

Here’s a look at what’s planned during these two IT conferences:

• On Monday, April 30, there’s a full-day tour of Death Valley planned. This event is leaving the Mirage at 8:00 am and includes photo opportunities at Dante’s View and Zabriskie Point, a scenic drive through the Artist’s Pallet, and a stop at Bad Water Basin—the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere!

• On Tuesday, May 1, Spousetivities Continue reading