DockerCon Europe Registration and Call for Proposals are OPEN
DockerCon 2017 in Austin was amazing! We are still on a high from the energy and excitement that is created when 5,500 members of the Docker Community are in one place. Containers are everywhere, and the learning, inspiration and networking that those four days brings is unrivaled. We welcomed amazing speakers, made tons of meaningful connections and are already geared up to do it again for DockerCon Europe: October 16 – 19th in Copenhagen! Early Bird registration is now open, hurry up and get your ticket before they sell out.
Register for DockerCon Europe!
In addition, today we opened the DockerCon Copenhagen Call for Papers. We hope that you were inspired by the Moby Project and LinuxKit announcements and are looking forward to your submissions on the following:
Using Docker
Has Docker technology made you better at what you do? Is Docker an integral part of your company’s tech stack? Do you use Docker to do big things?
By giving concrete, first-hand examples, tell us about your Docker usage, share your challenges and what you learned along the way, and inspire us on how to use Docker to accomplish real tasks. When attendees leave your session, they should understand Continue reading
Open vSwitch Day at OpenStack Summit 2017
This is a “liveblog” (not quite live, but you get the idea) of the Open vSwitch Open Source Day happening at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. Summaries of each of the presentations are included below.
Kubernetes and OVN on Windows
The first session was led by Cloudbase Solutions, a company out of Italy that has been heavily involved in porting OVS to Windows with Hyper-V. The first part of the session focused on bringing attendees up to speed on the current state of OVS and OVN on Hyper-V. Feature parity and user interface parity between OVS/OVN on Hyper-V is really close to OVS/OVN on Linux, which should make it easier for Linux sysadmins to use OVS/OVN on Hyper-V as well.
The second part of the session showed using OVN under Kubernetes to provide networking between Windows containers on Windows hosts and Linux containers on Linux hosts, including networking across multiple cloud providers.
Lightning Talks
The lightning talks were all under 5 minutes, so a brief summary of these are provided below:
- Joe Stringer showed how to set up OVS with an OpenFlow controller (Faucet) to do networking between multiple hosts in 5 minutes or less.
- A gentleman (I didn’t catch Continue reading
Open vSwitch Day at OpenStack Summit 2017
This is a “liveblog” (not quite live, but you get the idea) of the Open vSwitch Open Source Day happening at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. Summaries of each of the presentations are included below.
Kubernetes and OVN on Windows
The first session was led by Cloudbase Solutions, a company out of Italy that has been heavily involved in porting OVS to Windows with Hyper-V. The first part of the session focused on bringing attendees up to speed on the current state of OVS and OVN on Hyper-V. Feature parity and user interface parity between OVS/OVN on Hyper-V is really close to OVS/OVN on Linux, which should make it easier for Linux sysadmins to use OVS/OVN on Hyper-V as well.
The second part of the session showed using OVN under Kubernetes to provide networking between Windows containers on Windows hosts and Linux containers on Linux hosts, including networking across multiple cloud providers.
Lightning Talks
The lightning talks were all under 5 minutes, so a brief summary of these are provided below:
- Joe Stringer showed how to set up OVS with an OpenFlow controller (Faucet) to do networking between multiple hosts in 5 minutes or less.
- A gentleman (I didn’t catch Continue reading
Docker Enterprise Edition Brings New Life Back to Legacy Apps at Northern Trust
Many organizations understand the value of building modern 12-factor applications with microservices. However, 90+% of applications running today are still traditional, monolithic apps. That is also the case for Northern Trust – a 128-year old financial services company headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. At DockerCon 2017, Rob Tanner, Division Manager for Enterprise Middleware at Northern Trust, shared how they are using Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) to modernize their traditional applications to make them faster, safer, and more performant.
Bringing Agility and Security to Traditional Apps
Founded in 1889, Northern Trust is a global leader in asset servicing, asset management, and banking for personal and institutional clients. Their clients expect best-of-breed services and experiences from Northern Trust and Rob’s team plays a large role in delivering that. While their development teams are focused on microservices apps for greenfield projects, Rob is responsible for over 400 existing WebLogic, Tomcat, and .NET applications. Docker EE became the obvious choice to modernize these traditional apps and manage their incredibly diverse environment with a single solution.
Containerizing traditional applications with Docker EE gives Northern Trust a better way to manage them and some immediate benefits:
- Improved security: As a financial institution, security is a top priority. Continue reading
Liveblog: Deploying Containerized OpenStack: Challenges & Tools Comparison
This is a liveblog for an OpenStack Summit session on containerized OpenStack and a comparison of the tools used for containerized OpenStack. The speaker is Jaivish Kothari, from NEC Technologies. Two other speakers were listed on the title slide, but were apparently unable to make it to the Summit to present.
Kothari provides a brief overview of the session, then jumps into a discussion of deployment tools. As illustrated by one of his slides, there’s a huge collection of tools that are used to deploy OpenStack; some are “pure” deployment tools, others are configuration management tools. In this presentation, Kothari says he will focus specifically on OpenStack deployment tools, like Juju (Canonical), Fuel (Mirantis), Crowbar (Dell), and PackStack/TripleO (Red Hat), but I’m not sure how this relates to containerized OpenStack (per the session title).
According to Kothari, some of the challenges in “traditional” (non-containerized) deployment tools are best understood by looking at the challenges in deploying OpenStack:
- Difficulty related to deployment (conflicts due to services configuration, deployment still prone to failures)
- Ongoing lifecycle management of OpenStack components
This whole first section of the presentation was setting up the argument that containerizing your OpenStack control plane will help address these challenges. Continue reading
Liveblog: OpenStack Summit Keynote, Day 2
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Boston, MA. (I wasn’t able to liveblog yesterday’s keynote due to a schedule conflict.) It looks as if today’s keynote will have an impressive collection of speakers from a variety of companies, and—judging from the number of laptops on the stage—should feature a number of demos (hopefully all live).
The keynote starts with the typical high-energy video that’s intended to “pump up” the audience, and Mark Collier (COO, OpenStack Foundation) takes the stage promptly at 9am. Collier re-iterates a few statistics from yesterday’s keynote (attendees from 63 countries, for example). Collier shares that he believes that all major challenges humanity is trying to solve counts on computing. “All science is computer science,” according to Collier, which is both great but also represents a huge responsibility. He leads this discussion by pointing out what he believes to be the fundamental role of open source in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Collier also mentions a collection of “composable” open source projects that are leading the way toward a “cloud-native” future. All of these projects are designed in a way to be combined together in a “mix-and-match” Continue reading
Liveblog: Kuryr Project Update
This is a liveblog of an OpenStack Summit session providing an update on the Kuryr project. The speakers are Antoni Segura Puimedon and Irena Berezovsky. Kuryr, if you recall, was a project aimed at making OpenStack Neutron functionality available to Docker containers; it has since expanded to also offer Cinder and Manila storage to Docker containers, and has added support for both Docker Swarm and Kubernetes as well.
According to Puimedon, the latest release of Kuryr has a diverse base of contributors, with over 45 active contributors.
So, what will be in the Pike release? For the Kubernetes-specific support:
- This will be the first release
- Support for Kubernetes Services (this leverages LBaaS v2)
- Client- and server-side SSL support
- RDO packaging
What’s planned for Pike, but may not actually make it? (Again, this is for Kubernetes support.)
- Token support
- Resource pools
- Improved support for Services defined as LoadBalancer type
On the Docker side, the following new features and enhancements will arrive in Pike:
- Support for Swarm mode
- IPv4 and IPv6 networking
- TLS support between Docker and the libnetwork plugin
On the Fuxi side, Kuryr is adding support for Manila shares.
At this point, Berezovsky takes over to discuss the release Continue reading
Liveblog: AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it
This is a liveblog of the OpenStack Summit session titled “AT&T’s Container Strategy and OpenStack’s Role in it”. The speakers are Kandan Kathirvel and Amit Tank, both from AT&T. I really wanted to sit in on Martin Casado’s presentation next door (happening at the same time), but as much as I love watching/hearing Martin speak, I felt this like presentation might expose me to some new information.
Kathirvel kicks off the session with some quick introductions, then sets the stage for the session. Naturally, Kathirvel starts out by describing AT&T’s cloud deployment. (I say “naturally” because it seems that every presentation starts out with describing how great and how awesome the presenter’s company’s OpenStack cloud is.)
Following the discussion of AT&T’s cloud, Kathirvel launches into a discussion of container trends and demands. He indicates that he believes container usage (or demand?) for enterprise IT applications is huge (and will continue to be large), but doesn’t believe that will hold true for virtual network functions (VNFs) in telco clouds.
As for how containers and OpenStack may be coming together, Kathirvel describes three different use cases:
-
The first use case has OpenStack managing the infrastructure, with Kubernetes (or another container Continue reading
Liveblog: OpenStack Summit Keynote, Day 2
This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote of the OpenStack Summit in Boston, MA. (I wasn’t able to liveblog yesterday’s keynote due to a schedule conflict.) It looks as if today’s keynote will have an impressive collection of speakers from a variety of companies, and—judging from the number of laptops on the stage—should feature a number of demos (hopefully all live).
The keynote starts with the typical high-energy video that’s intended to “pump up” the audience, and Mark Collier (COO, OpenStack Foundation) takes the stage promptly at 9am. Collier re-iterates a few statistics from yesterday’s keynote (attendees from 63 countries, for example). Collier shares that he believes that all major challenges humanity is trying to solve counts on computing. “All science is computer science,” according to Collier, which is both great but also represents a huge responsibility. He leads this discussion by pointing out what he believes to be the fundamental role of open source in machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI). Collier also mentions a collection of “composable” open source projects that are leading the way toward a “cloud-native” future. All of these projects are designed in a way to be combined together in a “mix-and-match” Continue reading
DockerCon 2017: all the session videos are now live!
We’re happy to announce that all the breakout session video recordings from DockerCon 2017 are now available online! Special shoutout to all the amazing speakers for making their sessions informative and insightful. All the videos are published on the Docker Youtube channel and the presentation slides available from the Docker Slideshare account.
Here are the links to the playlists of each track:
Use Case Track
Use case talks are about practical applications of Docker and are heavy on technical detail and implementation advice. Topics covered during this track were related to high availability and parallel usage in the gaming industry, Cloud scale for e-commerce giants, Security compliance and system, protocols legacy in financial and health care institutions.
Black Belt Track
Black Belt talks were deeply technical sessions presented by Docker experts. These sessions are code and demo heavy and light on the slides. From container internals to advanced container orchestration, security and networking, this track is a delight for the container experts in the room.
Docker Deep Dive
This track focuses on the technical details associated with the different components of the Docker platform: advanced orchestration, networking, security, storage, management and plug-ins. The Docker engineering leads walk you through the best way to Continue reading
Core Engine and Windows Updates in Ansible 2.3
Although the majority of the features added to Ansible 2.3 were networking related, that’s not all folks!
There were several significant changes around module management, the Core engine, and Microsoft Windows support we’d love to show off.
For full details on the release, check out the changelog here.
Module Management
In prior releases, Ansible was organized in two separate module repositories: Ansible-modules-core and Ansible-modules-extras.
The intent was to differentiate the repositories in terms of code quality, feature enablement, and supportability of the modules. We believe we’ve developed a better process.
At the launch of 2.3, Ansible has moved to a metadata-based system for modules. Ansible modules now include an ANSIBLE_METADATA Block which specifies a support category: Core, Curated or Community.
- Core - supported and maintained by the Ansible engineering team
- Curated - supported and maintained by the Ansible engineering team and Ansible by Red Hat partners
- Community - supported and maintained by the Ansible community
In the new system, modules will be following a specific process per category.
Core modules
Modules that the Ansible engineering team directly maintain, and will ship with Ansible. These modules also receive slightly higher priority for pull requests. Any issues that are opened Continue reading
Automating F5 Big-IP Using Ansible webinar
The following blog contains answers to all questions asked during the Automating F5 BIG-IP using Ansible webinar.
Interested in exploring other Ansible webinars? Register for one of our upcoming webinars or watch an on-demand webinar.
Q: Can you pass the BIG-IP username and password by variable? Also, is there a way to mask the password in the Playbooks or manually feed the credentials as the Playbooks run? How can we ensure security here given that administrative passwords are clear text in the Playbooks themselves?
Yes, the BIG-IP username and password can be passed as a variable by referencing them from the inventory file or even provide them during runtime on the cli -- although this would show them in the process list if you did a 'ps'. You can also specify them in a vars_prompt; this would prevent them from being shown in 'ps'. The downside here is that this would limit the amount of automation you can provide because running the Playbook would require that either be typed in or specified with '-e' ('-e' auto fills vars_prompts that match). The recommended way is to get the vars from a secure location. Ansible provides Vault, Continue reading
Using a Makefile with Markdown Documents
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of using Markdown (specifically, MultiMarkdown) for the vast majority of all the text-based content that I create. Over the last few years, I’ve created used various tools and created scripts to help “reduce the friction” involved with outputting Markdown source files into a variety of destination formats (HTML, RTF, or DOCX, for example). Recently, thanks to Cody Bunch, I was pointed toward the use of a Makefile to assist in this area. After a short period of experimentation, I’m finding that I really like this workflow, and I wanted to share some details here with my readers.
First, if you’re not familiar with make and its use of a Makefile, check out this introduction. There’s a ton of power and flexibility here, of which I’ve only scratched the surface so far. The basic gist behind a Makefile is that it provides a set of instructions to the make command. Each set of instructions is tied to a target, which has one or more dependencies. In the “traditional” use cases for make, this is to allow programmers to define how a set of files should be compiled as well Continue reading
Top Reasons To Attend AnsibleFest London 2017
I remember the first AnsibleFest I attended – it was San Francisco 2014. I had been with Ansible for a week and had flown out to meet some of my new colleagues.
As a user of Ansible for the past year, I'd discovered how cheery and helpful the community was. "Newbies" dropping by the IRC channel on Freenode were always helped out, no matter how simple the question. The community spirit is something many people comment on when first using Ansible.
I remember meeting core engineer Brian Coca for the first time at that AnsibleFest too, also a recent joiner to the company. Brian was asked that morning if he'd give a talk, a request he calmly accepted as if he'd been asked to make a cup of tea. Top tip – never miss a talk given by Brian, you will learn something new!
Later, during the happy hour, I talked with lots of attendees, many just wanting to tell us how much they'd enjoyed the day. It was great to see the open source community feel extending to our full day conferences.
Two and half years later and I still see that community spirit day in, day out. Only now it's Continue reading
OpenVPN TAP adapter MTU in Windows
Recently I was in need of setting up some windows clients to connect to my OpenVPN server. This server running on Linux, uses a specific MTU value (let’s say 1400) to ensure maximum compatibility with different clients over different links.
In addition to the OpenVPN process itself, the kernel must also know about the correct MTU so packet size could be adjusted before reaching the tun/tap interface.
This is very easy to do in Linux. In fact you most likely do not need to do anything at all. OpenVPN will adjusted the MTU of the tun/tap interface while creating it. You can check the interfaces effective MTU by using ip link show or ifconfig command.
The same however can not be said about Windows. In a typical scenario, OpenVPN is not even directly responsible for creating the said interface. Instead, it requires the interface to be already in placed (which is achieved by calling tapinstall.exe during the initial setup) and then it would connect to it.
So even though you have specified your MTU settings in the OpenVPN profile, at least at the time of writing, this does not reflect the MTU of the interface that Windows kernel would Continue reading
User-guided caching in Docker for Mac
Recent Docker releases (17.04 CE Edge onwards) bring significant performance improvements to bind-mounted directories on macOS. (Docker users on the stable channel will see the improvements in the forthcoming 17.06 release.) Commands for bind-mounting directories have new options to selectively enable caching.
Containers that perform large numbers of read operations in mounted directories are the main beneficiaries. Here’s an illustration of the improvements in a few tools and applications in common use among Docker for Mac users: go list is 2.5× faster; symfony is 2.7× faster, and rake is 3.5× faster, as illustrated by the following graphs:
go list (2.5× speedup)
go list ./... in the moby/moby repository
symfony (2.7× speedup)
curl of the main page of the Symfony demo app
rake (3.5× speedup)
rake -T in @hirowatari’s benchmark
For more details about how and when to enable caching, and what’s going on under the hood, read on.
Basics of bind-mounting
A defining characteristic of containers is isolation: by default, many parts of the execution environment of a container are isolated both from other containers and from the host system. In the filesystem, isolation shows up as layering: the filesystem Continue reading
Technology Short Take #82
Welcome to Technology Short Take #82! This issue is a bit behind schedule; I’ve been pretty heads-down on some projects. That work will come to fruition in a couple weeks, so I should be able to come up for some air soon. In the meantime, here’s a few links and articles for your reading pleasure.
Networking
- Kristian Larsson shows how to validate data using YANG. Practical examples like this have really helped me better understand YANG and its relationship to structured data you might exchange with a device or service.
- There’s lots of talk about applying test-driven development (TDD) principles in various automation contexts, but I like the fact that Ajay Chenampara provides some practical examples in his blog post on applying TDD in network automation using Ansible.
- Matt Oswalt talks about how the combination of NAPALM and StackStorm enables some interesting results, including the ability to verify configuration consistency. StackStorm isn’t something I’ve had the opportunity to learn/use at all, but it’s on my (ever-growing) list of things to check out.
- Aaron Conole provides an overview of using the
ovs-dpctlcommand to “program” the Open vSwitch (OVS) kernel module. It’s a bit geeky, but does provide some insight into Continue reading
Docker Enterprise Edition Lights a New Spark of Innovation within MetLife
MetLife, the global provider of insurance, annuities, and employee benefit programs, will be celebrating it’s 150th birthday next year. Survival and success in their space depends on being agile and able to respond to changing market requirements. During the Day 2 General Session at DockerCon 2017, MetLife shared how they’re inspiring new innovation in their organization with Docker Enterprise Edition (EE).
Information Management is Core to MetLife
MetLife offers auto, home, dental, life, disability, vision, and health insurance to over 100 million customers across 50 countries. Their business relies on information – about policyholders, risk assessments, financial and market data, etc. Aaron Ades, AVP of Solutions Engineering at MetLife offers that they’ve been in the information management business for 150 years and have accumulated over 400 systems of record – some apps are over 30 years old.
The challenge for MetLife is that they still have a lot of legacy technology that they must work with. Aaron shared that there is still code running today that was first written in 1982, but they still need to deliver a modern experience on top of those legacy systems.
To hear more about how MetLife is staying ahead of their competition using Docker, Continue reading
Introducing Docker’s new CEO
Docker has celebrated a number of important milestones lately. March 20th was the fourth anniversary of the launch of the Docker project at PyCon in 2013. April 10th was the fourth anniversary of the day that I joined Solomon and a team of 14 other believers to help build this remarkable company. And, on April 18th, we brought the community, customers, and partners together in Austin for the fourth US-based DockerCon.
March 20th, 2013
Docker Team in 2013
DockerCon was a great opportunity to reflect on the progress we’ve seen in the past four years. Docker the company has grown from 15 to over 330 talented individuals. The number of contributors to Docker has grown from 10 to over 3300. Docker is used by millions of developers and is running on millions of servers. There are now over 900k dockerized apps that have been downloaded over 13 billion times. Docker is being used to cure diseases, keep planes in the air, to keep soldiers safe from landmines, to power the world’s largest financial networks and institutions, to process billions in transactions, to help create new companies, and to help revitalize existing companies. Docker has rapidly scaled revenues, building a sustainable Continue reading
DockerCon 2017 Online meetup Recap
Weren’t able to attend DockerCon 2017 or looking for a refresher? Check out the recording and slides from the DockerCon 2017 Online Meetup highlights recap of all the announcements and highlights from DockerCon by Patrick Chanezon and Betty Junod.
Watch the General Session Talks
The videos and slides from general session day 1 and day 2 as well as the top rated sessions are already available. The rest of the DockerCon slides and videos will soon be published on our slideshare account and all the breakout session video recordings available on our DockerCon 2017 youtube playlist.
Learn more about the Moby Project
The Moby Project is a new open-source project to advance the software containerization movement and help the ecosystem take containers mainstream. Learn more here.
Learn More about LinuxKit
LinuxKit is toolkit for building secure, portable and lean operating systems for containers. Read more about LinuxKit.
Learn More about the Modernize Traditional Applications Program:
The Modernize Traditional Applications (MTA) Program aims to help enterprises make their existing legacy apps more secure, more efficient and portable to hybrid cloud infrastructure. Read more about the Modernize Traditional Apps Program.
Weren’t able to attend #dockercon? Watch this recap video for key highlights !
Click Continue reading