ANSIBLE + MICROSOFT AZURE NEWS
The Azure and Ansible teams are collaborating on several interesting projects that we want to share. And if you joined us for AnsibleFest San Francisco earlier this month, you met both teams and heard some of the news. More on that below.
MS Ignite 2017
If you use Ansible to manage Azure and Windows environments, then hopefully you can join us at Microsoft Ignite this week in Orlando.
Ansible’s Matt Davis will co-present with Microsoft’s Hari Jayaraman, to discuss popular DevOps tools customers use to implement infrastructure as code processes in Azure. And the Ansible team will be in the Red Hat booth (#527) to demo automating Azure environments or any other questions you may have.
Session Info:
Infrastructure as Code
Friday, September 29
10:15 AM - 11:00 AM
Hyatt Regency Windermere W
New Azure Modules in 2.4
One of the many announcements at AnsibleFest included the 16 new Azure modules contributed by the Azure team. The focus of the team was to cover the base use cases for Ansible users running workloads at scale in Azure.
New modules were added to manage Azure services:
- Availability sets
- Scale sets
- Authentication (ACS)
- Functions
- DNS
- Load Balancer
- Managed Disks
Exciting new things for Docker with Windows Server 1709
What a difference a year makes… last September, Microsoft and Docker launched Docker Enterprise Edition (EE), a Containers-as-a-Service platform for IT that manages and secures diverse applications across disparate infrastructures, for Windows Server 2016. Since then we’ve continued to work together and Windows Server 1709 contains several enhancements for Docker customers.
Docker Enterprise Edition Preview
To experiment with the new Docker and Windows features, a preview build of Docker is required. Here’s how to install it on Windows Server 1709 (this will also work on Insider builds):
Install-Module DockerProvider Install-Package Docker -ProviderName DockerProvider -RequiredVersion preview
To run Docker Windows containers in production on any Windows Server version, please stick to Docker EE 17.06.
Docker Linux Containers on Windows
A key focus of Windows Server version 1709 is support for Linux containers on Windows. We’ve already blogged about how we’re supporting Linux containers on Windows with the LinuxKit project.
To try Linux Containers on Windows Server 1709, install the preview Docker package and enable the feature. The preview Docker EE package includes a full LinuxKit system (all 13MB of it) for use when running Docker Linux containers.
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LCOW_SUPPORTED", "1", "Machine") Restart-Service Docker
To disable, just remove the environment variable:
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("LCOW_SUPPORTED", Continue reading
Yes to databases in containers – Microsoft SQL Server available on Docker Store
Microsoft SQL Server 2017 is now available for the first time on multiple platforms: Windows, Linux and Docker. Your databases can be in containers with no lengthy setup and no prerequisites, and using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to modernize your database delivery. The speed and efficiency benefits of Docker and containerizing apps that IT Pros and developers have been enjoying for years are now available to DBAs.
Try the Docker SQL Server lab now and see how database containers start in seconds, and how you can package your own schemas as Docker images.
If you’ve ever sat through a SQL Server install, you know why this is a big deal: SQL Server takes a while to set up, and running multiple independent SQL Server instances on the same host is not simple. This complicates maintaining dev, test and CI/CD systems where tests and experiments might break the SQL Server instance.
With SQL Server in Docker containers, all that changes. Getting SQL Server is as simple as running `docker image pull`, and you can start as many instances on a host as you want, each of them fresh and clean, and tear them back down when you’re done.
Database engines Continue reading
A Day in the Life of a Docker Admin
About two months ago, we celebrated SysAdmin Day and kicked off our learning series for IT professionals. So far we’ve gone through the basics of containers and how containers are delivering value back to the company through cost savings. Now we begin the next stage of the journey by introducing how to deploy and operate containerized applications.
For the next few weeks, we are going to relate typical IT administrative tasks that many of you are familiar with to the tasks of a Docker admin. In the end, containerized applications are still applications and it is still primarily the responsibility of IT to secure and manage them. That is the same regardless of if the application runs in a container or not.
In this “A Day in the LIfe of a Docker Admin” series, we will discuss how common IT tasks translate to the world of Docker, such as:
- Managing .NET apps and migrating them off Windows Server 2008
- How networking with containers work and how to build an agile and secure network for containers
- How to achieve a secure and compliant application environment for any industry
- Integrating Docker with monitoring and logging tools
As a first step, let’s make Continue reading
Technology Short Take #87
Welcome to Technology Short Take #87! I have a mix of newer and older items for you this time around. While I’m a bit short on links in some areas, hopefully this is outweighed by some good content in other areas. Here’s hoping you find something useful!
Networking
- Vincent Bernat has a really in-depth article on IPv4 route lookup on Linux (and one on IPv6 route lookup as well).
- Ivan Pepelnjak has a great article that tries to get to the kernel of truth in the middle of the intent-based networking hype.
- Jason Edelman of Network2Code also has a post on intent-based network automation with Ansible, in which he breaks down the idea of intent-based networking (IBN) and how tools such as Ansible or NAPALM can make it possible.
- From the Department of “Sitting in my Inbox for Way Too Long”, I wanted to point out a company that I ran into back in May of this year at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. The company is VirTool Networks (catchy, eh?), and their product (VirTool Network Analyzer) is aimed at providing some operational visibility into OpenStack virtual networks. I saw a demo of the product—it looks quite handy, Continue reading
Some Static Site Resources
Over the last few days—prompted perhaps by my article with some additional information on my site migration—a few folks in the community have reached out to me to share some resources they thought I might find useful. In turn, I’d like to share them with you, my readers, in the event you might find them useful as well.
This is (clearly and obviously) not a comprehensive list, but here’s what folks have shared with me over the last few days:
- Josh Habdas shared this link with me; it’s a write-up he did that involves the use of a Ruby-based tool called
s3_website. The main problem I have with this write-up is that it hides too many of the details, preventing (in my opinion) some of the valuable learning that can come from such an effort. - This article by Ricardo Feliciano of CircleCI does expose some of the gory details, and might be useful for those considering the inclusion of a CI/CD pipeline in their blogging workflow (like I am).
- Finally, I found this post describing how to build a multi-region S3+CloudFront setup that would protect your site in the event of a single S3 region being unavailable.
I’ll update this Continue reading
HashiConf 2017 Wrap Up
HashiConf 2017 is a wrap for me, and as I’m sitting here at the airport lounge in Austin I’d thought I’d post links back to the liveblogs I published as well as a few thoughts on the conference overall.
Liveblogs
First, here are links to the liveblogs published during the event:
- HashiConf 2017 Day 1 Keynote
- Liveblog: Journey to the Cloud wth Packer and Terraform
- Liveblog: Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power
- HashiConf 2017 Day 2 Keynote
- Liveblog: Cloud Native Infrastructure
Closing Thoughts
I think it was a pretty good event. The venue (JW Marriott in Austin) seemed roughly appropriate for the number of attendees (around 800, I believe), although some additional seating during meal times would have been a good idea. The conference Wi-Fi was mostly OK, though it had its moments.
The quality of sessions varied; some sessions were very good; others, not so much (unfortunately). It would have been good to see a clearer breakdown of the sessions according to area/theme. They had 3 content tracks, but it wasn’t really clear to me if the tracks had any central theme. I, personally, bounced around all three tracks.
I did like the inclusion of high-top tables at the Continue reading
Liveblog: Cloud Native Infrastructure
This is a liveblog of the HashiConf 2017 session titled “Cloud Native Infrastructure.” The speaker is Kris Nova, a Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Kris, along with Justin Garrison, authored the O’Reilly Cloud Native Infrastructure book (more information here). As one of the last sessions (if not the last session) I’ll be able to attend, I’m looking forward to this session.
Kris is a self-confessed Linux lover, loves writing in Golang, is a Kubernetes maintainer, and works on Azure at Microsoft.
So, what is “cloud-native infrastructure”? To answer that, Nova first tries to answer “what is a cloud?” Nova breezes by that definition without going into any real detail (or any real definition), and proceeds to talk about what infrastructure is. Again, Nova breezes by that without providing any real definition or depth, and proceeds to ask “Why is infrastructure better in the cloud?” According to Nova, infrastructure is better in the cloud because management can be as simple as an HTTP request. The next few slides in Nova’s presentation compare the “traditional” ways of managing infrastructure (provisioning switches, patching cables, troubleshooting problems) are now, when infrastructure is in the cloud, as simple as a series Continue reading
Get Familiar with Docker Enterprise Edition Client Bundles
Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) is the only Containers as a Service (CaaS) Platform for IT that manages and secures diverse applications across disparate infrastructure, both on-premises and in the cloud.
There’s a little mentioned big feature in Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) that seems to always bring smiles to the room once it’s displayed. Before I tell you about it, let me first describe the use case. You’re a sysadmin managing a Docker cluster and you have the following requirements:
- Different individuals in your LDAP/AD need various levels of access to the containers/services in your cluster
- Some users need to be able to go inside the running containers.
- Some users just need to be able to see the logs
- You do NOT want to give SSH access to each host in your cluster.
Now, how do you achieve this? The answer, or feature rather, is a client bundle. When you do a docker version command you will see two entries. The client portion of the engine is able to connect to a local server AND a remote once a client bundle is invoked.
What is a client bundle?
A client bundle is a group of certificates downloadable directly from the Docker Universal Continue reading
HashiConf 2017 Day 2 Keynote
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote (general session) at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, TX. Speakers today will (apparently, based on the schedule) include someone from Amazon Web Services and Kelsey Hightower from Google.
The keynote starts off with a photo montage of attendees, sessions, and speakers from the previous day, focusing mostly on the evening party (a pretty traditional thing for most conferences). The photo montage is followed by a gentleman (he doesn’t identify himself) who kicks off the keynote by bringing out Seth Vargo, Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp.
Vargo’s presentation is titled “The Ecological Impact of Compute,” and discusses the environmental impact of cloud computing and the pervasive use of computing/compute power around the world. Vargo presents statistics that show on-premises data centers actually consume more electricity than the mega-scale cloud providers, and that getting these people onto a cloud provider would actually reduce overall power consumption (and, by extension, environmental impacts related to power consumption). Toward the end of Vargo’s presentation, it starts to feel more like a sales pitch for Nomad couched in environmental awareness.
At this point, Vargo introduces Kelsey Hightower, Senior Developer Advocate from Google. Hightower’s talk is about “Hashinetes,” Continue reading
Docker Official Images are now Multi-platform
This past week, Docker rolled out a big update to our Official Images to make them multi-platform aware. Now, when you run docker run hello-world, Docker CE and EE will pull and run the correct hello-world image whether that’s for x86-64 Linux, Windows, ARM, IBM Z mainframes or any other system where Docker runs. With Docker rapidly adding support for additional operating systems (like Windows) and CPU architectures (like IBM Z) this is an important UX improvement.
Docker Official Images are a curated set of container images that include:
- Base operating system images like Ubuntu, BusyBox and Debian
- Ready-to-use build and runtime images for popular programming languages like Go, Python and Java
- Easy-to-use images for data stores such as PostgreSQL, Neo4j and Redis
- Pre-packaged software images to run WordPress, Ghost and Redmine and many other popular open source projects
The official images have always been available for x86-64 Linux. Images for non x86 Linux architectures have also been available, but to be fetched either from a different namespace (docker pull s390x/golang on IBM Z mainframe) or using a different tag (docker pull golang:nanoserver on Windows). This was not the seamless and portable experience Continue reading
Liveblog: Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power
This is a liveblog for the HashiConf 2017 session titled “Terraform Abstractions for Safety and Power.” The speaker is Calvin French-Owen, Founder and co-CTO at Segment.
French-Owen starts by describing Segment, and providing a quick overview of Segment’s use of Terraform. Segment is all on AWS, and is leveraging ECS (Elastic Container Service) to schedule containers. Segment’s journey with Terraform started about 2.5 years ago. They now have 30-50 developers interacting with Terraform weekly, and Terraform is managing tens of thousands of AWS resources.
Digging into the meat of the presentation, French-Owens starts by answering the question, “Why is safety such a big deal?” There’s more to the puzzle than just preventing downtime. To illustrate that point, French-Owens shares some conclusions from an academic paper that explores why developers choose software programs. It turns out that to scale adoption, you must reduce the risk of adoption (developers avoid programs based on risk).
Naturally, French-Owens talks about how Terraform can “feel scary” since it’s so easy to destroy a bunch of infrastructure with only terraform destroy.
Before moving into a discussion on how to make Terraform feel less scary, French-Owens first covers some “Terraform nouns” (HCL, HashiCorp Configuration Continue reading
Liveblog: Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform
This is a liveblog of the HashiConf 2017 breakout session titled “Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform,” presented by Nadeem Ahmad, a senior software developer at Box.
Ahmad starts with a quick review of Box, but (thankfully) transitions quickly to his particular team at Box (the Productivity Engineering team). His team’s customers are the software developers at Box, and it’s his team’s job to help make them more productive and efficient. One of the tools that Ahmad’s team built was a tool called Cluster Runner, which is intended to streamline running unit and integration tests on the code the developers were writing.
This brings Ahmad to the crux of this presentation, which is telling the story of how Box went from a bare-metal environment to a cloud-based architecture. The purpose of this migration was to address some of the limitations of their bare-metal environment (inelastic, divergent host configurations over time, etc.). Box leveraged Platform9 to build an OpenStack-based private cloud, with the intent of switching to AWS, GCP, or Azure in the future as private cloud resources aged out.
Ahmad next goes into why Box selected the process they did; they wanted to move away from configuration Continue reading
HashiConf 2017 Day 1 Keynote
This is a liveblog from the day 1 keynote (general session) at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, TX. I’m attending HashiConf this year as an “ordinary attendee” (not working or speaking), and so I’m looking forward to being able to actually sit in on sessions for a change.
At 9:43am, the keynote kicks off with someone (I don’t know who, he doesn’t identify himself) who provides some logistics about the event, the Wi-Fi, asking attendees to tweet, etc. After a couple minutes, he brings out Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder and co-CTO of HashiCorp, onto the stage.
Hashimoto starts out his talk by reviewing a bit of the history and growth of both HashiConf (and, indirectly, HashiCorp). Last year, HashiCorp has grown from about 50 employees to now over 130 employees. HashiCorp has also seen significant community growth, Hashimoto says, and he reviews the growth in in the use of HashiCorp’s products (Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad). Hashimoto also reviews the growth in their commercial products (Consul Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, and Terraform Enterprise). Hashimoto also discusses HashiCorp’s commitment to open source software and the desire to properly balance commercial (paid) products versus free (open source) projects.
Hashimoto now transitions his discussion Continue reading
New Website Features
One of the reasons I migrated this site to Hugo a little over a month ago was that Hugo offered the ability to do things with the site that I couldn’t (easily) do with Jekyll (via GitHub Pages). Over the last few days, I’ve taken advantage of Hugo’s flexibility to add a couple new features to the site.
New functionality that I’ve added includes:
Category- and tag-specific RSS feeds: Hugo can easily generate category- and tag-specific RSS feeds, enabling readers to subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular category or tag. On the taxonomy list pages—these are the pages that list all the posts found in a particular category or tag—there’s now a small link to the RSS feed for that specific category or tag. (As an example, checkout the list of posts in the “General” category.)
(Truly) Related posts: The “Related Posts” section at the bottom of posts has returned, thanks to new functionality found in Hugo 0.27 (functionality that was, apparently, inspired in part by my experiences—see the docs page). This section lists 3 posts that are considered by Hugo to be related, based on the category and tags assigned to the posts.
It’s Continue reading
Docker at Microsoft Ignite 2017
Docker will be at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando, FL the week of Sept 24th to showcase the latest release of Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) and the joint solutions with our partner Microsoft. Docker Enterprise Edition is the only platform available to secure and manage Linux and Windows containers in production.
In the Docker Booth #2127
Visit Docker in Booth #2127 for a #DockerSelfie, a chance for cool swag and to learn more about how Docker Enterprise Edition can help you save costs on legacy applications, accelerate your cloud strategy and uniformly secure and manage your Linux and Windows app landscape.
Register Here for daily in-booth talks or to schedule time to ask questions about containers and clouds on Linux and Windows Server.
- Monday 3pm: Save $ on Legacy Apps with Docker
- Tuesday 11am: Windows and Linux Together with Docker EE
- Tuesday 3pm: Docker Enterprise Edition Demo
- Wednesday 11am: Take Legacy .NET Apps to Azure with Docker
- Thursday 11am: Docker Enterprise Edition Demo
Add these great sessions to your schedule
Container Fest on Sunday Sept 24th:
Docker will be on hand at the Container Fest Pre Day to discuss the possibilities of Docker Enterprise Edition for modernizing traditional Windows and Continue reading
Some Q&A About the Migration to Hugo
As you may already know, I recently completed the migration of this site from GitHub Pages (generated using Jekyll) to S3/CloudFront and Hugo for static site generation. Since then, I’ve talked with a few readers who had additional questions about the site migration. I thought others might have the same questions, so I decided to gather the most common questions here and share the answers with everyone.
(For those who need a quick primer on how the site is set up/served, refer to this post.)
I’ll structure the rest of this post in a “question-and-answer” format.
Q: Why migrate away from Jekyll?
A: Some of this is tied up with GitHub Pages (see the next question), but the key things that drove me away were very slow build times (in excess of five minutes), limited troubleshooting, dealing with Ruby dependencies in order to run local Jekyll builds (needed to help with troubleshooting), and limited functionality (due in part to GitHub Pages’ restrictive support for plugins).
Q: Why migrate away from GitHub Pages?
A: If you’re happy with Jekyll (and it’s a fine static site generator for lots of folks), having it integrated on the backend with GitHub Pages Continue reading
Build Your DockerCon Europe 2017 Agenda!
It’s that moment you’ve been waiting for…It’s time to build your DockerCon Agenda!
DockerCon is coming back to Europe with some of the best content we’ve ever presented. Don’t miss out and register now before it’s too late. If you are just learning about Docker or have been dabbling in containers for a while, we’re confident that DockerCon will have the right content for you. With eight tracks, two summits (Moby Project Summit and Enterprise Summit) and more than 60 sessions presented by Docker Engineering, Docker Captains, partners, practitioners and customers such as Finnish Railways, MetLife, PayPal, Splunk and Assa Abloy, DockerCon 2017 will cover a wide range of use cases and topics.
Build your agenda
We encourage you to review the full catalogue of DockerCon sessions and build your agenda for the week. You’ll find a new agenda builder that allows you to apply filters based on your areas of interest, experience, job role and more! If you’ve registered you’ll also be able to get recommended sessions as well build you schedule.
Check Out All The SessionsOne of our favorite features of the Agenda Builder is the recommendations generated based on your profile and marked interest Continue reading
VMC Launches with Ansible Modules for Provisioning and Management
With the recent announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) availability and pricing, the first question the Ansible team received was, “Will the vmware_guest modules work with cloud?”
Before we answer that question, let’s take a step back and look at why teams use Ansible to provision and manage VMware environments. VMware offers several automation tools that work well within the VMware ecosystems - so why Ansible?
What if you want to share automation across VMware and non-VMware infrastructure?
Enter Ansible. Ansible allows organizations to standardize on a simple IT automation language, regardless of technology, vendor or functional area.
- VMware -
- Cloud -
- Windows -
- Linux -
- Networking -
- Etc.
The Ansible VMware page does a good job of covering the key points if you want more detail.
VMC Launch
The good news is - yes - the Ansible VMware modules work with VMC out of the box.
VMC was announced as a hybrid cloud solution for VMware customers who want to leverage tools and skills that already exist in the organization. Using Ansible to provision VMs in on-premise (vSphere) and cloud (VMC) environments works in exactly the same manner.
This is the way you would expect the Ansible modules Continue reading
Preview: Linux Containers on Windows
Microsoft is getting ready for the next big update for Windows Server (check out today’s complimentary Microsoft blog post) and some of the new features are very exciting for Docker users. One of the most important enhancements is that Docker can now run Linux containers on Windows, using Hyper-V technology.
Running Docker Linux containers on Windows requires a minimal Linux kernel and userland to host the container processes. This is exactly what the LinuxKit toolkit was designed for: creating secure, lean and portable Linux subsystems that can provide Linux container functionality as a component of a container platform.
We’ve been busy prototyping LinuxKit support for Docker Linux containers on Windows and have a working preview for you to try. This is still a work in progress, and requires either the recently announced “Windows Server Insider” or Windows 10 Insider builds.
Running Docker Linux Containers on Windows with LinuxKit
The instructions below have been tested on Windows 10 and Windows Server Insider builds 16278 and 16281.
Be sure to install Docker for Windows (Windows 10) or Docker Enterprise Edition (Windows Server Insider) before starting.
Setup Docker and LinuxKit
A preview build of LinuxKit is available by simply running Continue reading