DockerCon 2017 first speakers announced

To the rest of the world, DockerCon 2017 may seem a ways away, but here at Docker we are heads down reading your Call for Papers submissions and curating content to make this the biggest and best DockerCon to date. With that, we are thrilled to share with you the DockerCon 2017 Website with helpful information including ten of the first confirmed speakers and sessions.

If you want to join this amazing lineup and haven’t submitted your cool hack, use case or deep dive session, don’t hesitate! The Call for Papers closes this Saturday, January 14th.

Submit a talk

First DockerCon speakers

Laura Frank

Sr. Software Engineer, Codeship

Everything You Thought You Already Knew About Orchestration

Julius Volz

Co-founder, Prometheus

Monitoring, the Prometheus Way

Liz Rice

Co-founder & CEO, Microscaling Systems

What have namespaces done for you lately?

Thomas Graf

Principal Engineer at Noiro, Cisco

Cilium – BPF & XDP for containers

Brendan Gregg 

Sr. Performance Architect, Netflix

Container Tracing Deep Dive

Thomas Shaw

Build Engineer, Activision

Activision’s Skypilot: Delivering amazing game experiences through containerized pipelines

Fabiane Nardon

Chief Scientist Continue reading

Now Open: 2017 Docker Scholarship & Meet the 2016 Recipients!

Last year, Docker announced our inaugural Docker Scholarship Program in partnership with Hack Reactor. The 2017 scholarship to Hack Reactor’s March cohort is now open and accepting applications.

The scholarship includes full tuition to Hack Reactor, pending program acceptance, and recipients will be paired with a Docker mentor.

Applications will be reviewed and candidates who are accepted into the Hack Reactor program and meet Docker’s criteria will be invited to Docker HQ for a panel interview with Docker team members. Scholarships will be awarded based on acceptance to the Hack Reactor program, demonstration of personal financial need and quality of application responses. The Docker scholarship is open to anyone who demonstrates a commitment to advancing equality in their community. All gender and gender identities are encouraged to apply. Click here for more information.

Apply Now

We are excited to introduce our 2016 Docker scholarship recipients, Maurice Okumu and Savaughn Jones!

In their own words, learn more about Maurice and Savaughn below:

Maurice Okumu 

My name is Maurice Okumu and I was born and raised in Kenya. I came to the USA about three years ago after having lived in Dubai for more than five Continue reading

Some Reading on Application Containers

One aspect of my pending migration to Ubuntu Linux on my primary laptop has been the opportunity to explore “non-traditional” uses for Linux containers. In particular, the idea of using Docker (or systemd-nspawn or rkt) to serve as a sandbox (of sorts) for GUI applications really intrigues me. This isn’t a use case that many of the container mechanisms are aiming to solve, but it’s an interesting use case nevertheless (to me, anyway).

So, in no particular order, here are a few articles I found about using Linux containers as application containers/sandboxes (mostly focused around GUI applications):

A Docker-Like Container Management using systemd
Running containers without Docker
Containerizing Graphical Applications on Linux with systemd-nspawn
Debian Containers with systemd-nspawn
Using your own containers with systemd-nspawn and overlayfs

I was successful in using Docker to containerize Firefox (see my “dockerfiles” repository on GitHub)), and was also successful in using systemd-nspawn in the same way, including the use of overlayfs. My experiments have been quite helpful and informative; I have some ideas that may percolate into future blog posts.

Docker Storage and Infinit FAQ

Last December, Docker acquired a company called Infinit. Using their technology, we will provide secure distributed storage out of the box, making it much easier to deploy stateful services and legacy enterprise applications on Docker.

During the last Docker Online Meetup, Julien Quintard, member of Docker’s technical staff and former CEO at Infinit, went through the design principles behind their product and demonstrated how the platform can be used to deploy a storage infrastructure through Docker containers in a few command lines.

Providing state to applications in Docker requires a backend storage component that is both scalable and resilient in order to cope with a variety of use cases and failure scenarios. The Infinit Storage Platform has been designed to provide Docker applications with a set of interfaces (block, file and object) allowing for different tradeoffs.

Check out the following slidedeck to learn more about the internals of their platform:

Unfortunately, the video recording from the meetup is not available this time around but you can watch the following presentation and demo of Infinit from its CTO Quentin Hocquet at the Docker Distributed Systems Summit:

Docker and Infinit FAQ

1. Do you consider NFS/GPFS and other HPC cluster Continue reading

Attending DockerCon? Choose what workshop to attend

Following in last year’s major success, we are excited to be bringing back and expand the paid workshops at DockerCon 2017. The pre-conference workshops will focus on a range of subjects from Docker 101 to deep dives in networking, Docker for JAVA and  advanced orchestration. Each workshop is designed to give you hands-on instruction and insight on key Docker topics, taught by Docker Engineers and Docker Captains. The workshops are a great opportunity to get better acquainted and excited about Docker technology to start off DockerCon week.

Take advantage of the lowest DockerCon pricing and get your Early Bird Ticket + Workshop now! Early Bird Tickets are limited and will sell out in the next two weeks!

Here are the basics of the DockerCon workshops:

Date: Monday, April 17, 2017

Time: 2:00pm – 5:00pm

Where: Austin Convention Center – 500 E. Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, TX

Cost: $150

Class size: Classes will remain small and are limited to 50 attendees per class.

Registration: The workshops are only open to DockerCon attendees. You can register for the workshops as an add-on package through the registration site here.

Below are overviews of each workshop. To learn more about each topic head over Continue reading

How to Extend Ansible Through Plugins

Did you know a large portion of Ansible’s functionality comes from the Ansible plugin system? These important pieces of code augment Ansible’s core functionality such as parsing and loading inventory and Playbooks, running Playbooks and reading the results. Essentially, Ansible uses plugins to extend what the system is doing under the hood.

In this blog, I’ll review each of these plugins and offer a high-level overview on how to write your own plugin to extend Ansible functionality.

Action Plugins

One of the core critical plugins used by Ansible are action plugins. Anytime you run a module, Ansible first runs an action plugin.

Action plugins are a layer between the executor engine and the module and allow for controller-side actions to be taken before the module is executed. A good example of this is the template module. If you look at template.py in the modules directory, it’s basically a Python stub with documentation strings, everything is done by the action plugin. The template action plugin itself creates the template file locally as a temporary file, and then uses the copy or file modules to push it out to the target system.

If Ansible finds an action plugin with the Continue reading

containerd livestream recap

In case you missed it last month, we announced that Docker is extracting a key component of its container platform, a part of the engine plumbing called containerd – a core container runtime – and committed to donating it to an open foundation.

You can find up-to-date roadmap, architecture and API definitions in the Github repository, and more details about the project in our engineering team’s blog post.

You can also watch the following video recording of the containerd online meetup, for a summary and Q&A with Arnaud Porterie, Michael Crosby, Stephen Day, Patrick Chanezon and Solomon Hykes from the Docker team:

Here is the list of top questions we got following this announcement:

Q. Are you planning to run docker without runC ?

A. Although runC is the default runtime, as of  Docker 1.12, it can be replaced by any other OCI-compliant implementation. Docker will be compliant with the OCI Runtime Specification

Q. What major changes are on the roadmap for swarmkit to run on containerd if any? 

A. SwarmKit is using Docker Engine to orchestrate tasks, and Docker Engine is already using containerd for container execution. So technically, you are already using Continue reading

DockerCon 2017: Call For Papers FAQ

It’s a new year, and we are looking for new stories of how you are using Docker technology to do big things. Submit your cool hack, use case or deep dive sessions before the DockerCon 2017 CFP closes on January 14th.

To help with your submissions, we’ve answered the most frequent questions below and put together a list of tips to help get your proposal selected.

Q. How do I submit a proposal?

A. Submit your proposal here.

Q. What kind of talks are you looking for?

A. This year, we are looking for cool hacks, user stories and deep dive submissions:

• Cool Hacks: Show us your cool hack and wow us with the interesting ways you can push the boundaries of the Docker stack. You do not have to have your hack ready by the submission deadline, just clearly explain your hack, what makes it cool and the technologies you will use.

• Using Docker: Tell us first-hand about your Docker usage, challenges and what you learned along the way and inspire us on how to use Docker to accomplish real tasks.

• Deep Dives: Propose code and demo heavy deep-dive sessions on what you have been able to transform with Continue reading

My (Evolving) Multi-Platform Toolbelt

A few days ago I posted a tweet about a new tool I’d (re-)discovered called jrnl. Someone replied to that tweet, asking me to list my “multi-platform toolbelt.” While it’s still evolving (every day!), I thought it might make for a good blog post. So, here’s a list of my still-evolving multi-platform toolbelt.

• Sublime Text: Over the last few years, I’ve moved to creating the vast majority of my content in Markdown (MultiMarkdown, to be more specific). At first I was using OS X-specific text editors (first TextMate 1.x, then BBEdit), but last year I switched to Sublime Text. Sublime Text supports OS X, Linux, and Windows. I don’t have any Windows-based systems, so I only use it on OS X and Linux.

• Wire: My use of Wire is still a bit limited, but only because the reach of the platform is also still a bit limited (this is a classical example of network effect). I’m currently using Wire on Linux and OS X, with plans to extend to iOS and Android. (If you’re using Wire, feel free to look me up! My username is “scottslowe”).

• IMAP/SMTP: I’ve standardized on using IMAP/SMTP for all my e-mail Continue reading

New Year’s Resolution: Learn Docker

Remember last year when I said the market for Docker jobs was blowing up? Well, it’s more than doubled in the last year. And Swarm is also rising quickly, growing 12829%, almost all of that in the last year. We expect that with our partnership with Microsoft and Windows Docker containers, that this will grow even faster in the next year as .NET developers start to containerize their applications and Windows IT Professionals start porting their infrastructure to Docker. Take a look at this trendline from indeed.com.

So what are you doing to increase your Docker skills? Want a few suggestions?

Whether you’re a developer or more an ops person, a great place to start is the Docker Labs repository, which has currently 28 labs for you to choose from. They range from beginner tutorials, to orchestration workshops, security and networking tutorials, and guides for using different programming languages and developer tools.

Of course there’s also the Docker Documentation, which has a rich set of resources.

At Dockercon 2017 in April, there will be rich set of material for beginners and experts alike, and you will get to meet people from all over the world Continue reading

Technology Short Take #75

Welcome to Technology Short Take #75, the final Technology Short Take for 2016. Fortunately, it’s not the final Technology Short Take ever, as I’ll be back in 2017 with more content. Until then, here’s some data center-related articles and links for your enjoyment.

Networking

• Ajay Chenampara has some observations about running Ansible at scale against network devices.
• Andrey Khomyakov shares some information on automating the setup of whitebox switches running Cumulus Linux in part 2 of this series on learning network automation.
• Russell Bryant has shared the results of some testing comparing ML2+OVS and OVN as backends for OpenStack networking. As Russell indicates in his post, some additional analysis is needed to truly understand what’s happening, but early looks at the results of his tests show performance improvements in OVN versus ML2+OVS when it comes to total time required to boot a VM.
• Ivan Pepelnjak shares a Python script that creates Ansible inventory from Vagrant’s SSH configuration. Handy.

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around!

Security

• James Green shares some information on Docker Bench, a tool designed to help secure Docker environments.
• Via Mike Foley, the community now has a new resource to help educate on VM escapes.
• Gordon Turner Continue reading

Top Docker content of 2016

2016 has been an amazing year for Docker and the container industry. We had 3 major releases of Docker engine this year , and tremendous increase in usage. The community has been following along and contributing amazing Docker resources to help you learn and get hands-on experience. Here’s some of the top read and viewed content for the year:

Releases

Of course releases are always really popular, particularly when they fit requests we had from the community. In particular, we had:

• Docker for Mac & Docker for Windows Beta and GA release blog posts, and the video

• Docker 1.12 Built-in Orchestration release, and the DockerCon keynote where we announced it

• And the release of the Docker for AWS and Azure beta

Windows Containers

When Microsoft made Windows 2016 generally available, people rushed to

• Our release blog to read the news
• Tutorials to find out how to use Windows containers powered by Docker
• The commercial relationship blog post to understand how it all fits together

About Docker

We also provide a lot of information about how to use Docker. In particular, these posts and articles that we shared on social media were the most read:

• Containers are Not VMs by Mike Continue reading

Looking Back: 2016 Project Report Card

As I’ve done for the last few years, in early 2016 I published a list of my planned personal projects for the year. In this post, I’d like to look back on that list of projects and grade myself on my progress (or lack of progress, if that is the case). Even though 2016 isn’t over yet, it’s close enough to the end of the year that things won’t change that much before 2017 is upon us.

For reference, here’s the list of planned 2016 projects:

1. Complete a new book (again)
2. Make more open source contributions
3. Expand my knowledge and use of Python
4. Expand my knowledge, use, and focus on public cloud services
5. Complete a “wildcard project”

Let’s look at each of these planned projects and see how I fared.

1. Complete a new book (again): Well—in the spirit of total honesty and transparency—this was a major failure. Not only did I fail to complete the network automation book I’ve been working on with Matt Oswalt and Jason Edelman, but the other book project I had planned also did not go anywhere. Granted, the circumstances preventing the second book project were outside my control, but the fact remains I still did Continue reading

Our Most Popular Blog Posts of 2016

2016, what a year. Ansible upgrades galore, Tower 3 was released, a tipping point for DevOps, and much more.

All these themes were reflected in our blog this year. From doing more with automation, working across platforms (think Windows automation), orchestrating containers at scale, to exploring all the great new features in Tower 3, we covered a lot.

Just in case you missed them, here are our 10 most viewed blog posts of the year (plus a sneaky few honorable mentions).

1. 6 Ways Ansible Makes Docker-Compose Better

Containers are an integral part of DevOps workflows. With containers you can be sure that if you build an application once, you can run it in the same way across every environment along the application lifecycle. That’s great, until one developer announces the need for a second, third, or fourth container. More of them, all doing different things, and all connecting together – somehow. But how? Docker has a tool that can help – docker-compose. But it’s limited to environments with a Docker-centric view of the world and doesn’t solve non-Docker orchestration problems. That’s where Ansible comes in. Read more

2. Testing Ansible Roles with Docker

Ansible plus Docker was a big deal in 2016, Continue reading

Opening Web Internet Location Files on Ubuntu

As part of my effort to make myself and my workflows more “cross-platform friendly,” I’ve been revisiting certain aspects of how I do things. One of the things I’m reviewing is how I capture—and later review—posts or articles on the web. On OS X, I would run an AppleScript that generated a .webloc file (aka an Internet location file). This is an XML file that OS X understands. However, Linux doesn’t natively understand these files, so today I came up with a solution to reading .webloc files with Ubuntu and Firefox.

The solution to the file involves the use of xmllint, a tool that you can install on Ubuntu as part of the “libxml2-utils” package. Using xmllint, you can easily extract a single XML element from an XML file—and .webloc files are just XML files. For the sake of illustration, here’s the contents of a .webloc file generated on OS X:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>URL</key>
    <string>http://blog.fntlnz.wtf/post/systemd-nspawn/</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Using xmllint, you can extract the URL value, and then pass Continue reading

Understanding Docker Networking Drivers and their use cases

Applications requirements and networking environments are diverse and sometimes opposing forces. In between applications and the network sits Docker networking, affectionately called the Container Network Model or CNM. It’s CNM that brokers connectivity for your Docker containers and also what abstracts away the diversity and complexity so common in networking. The result is portability and it comes from CNM’s powerful network drivers. These are pluggable interfaces for the Docker Engine, Swarm, and UCP that provide special capabilities like multi-host networking, network layer encryption, and service discovery.

Naturally, the next question is which network driver should I use? Each driver offers tradeoffs and has different advantages depending on the use case. There are built-in network drivers that come included with Docker Engine and there are also plug-in network drivers offered by networking vendors and the community. The most commonly used built-in network drivers are bridge, overlay and macvlan. Together they cover a very broad list of networking use cases and environments. For a more in depth comparison and discussion of even more network drivers, check out the Docker Network Reference Architecture.

Bridge Network Driver

The bridge networking driver is the first driver on our list. It’s simple to understand, Continue reading

Docker & Prometheus Joint Holiday Meetup Recap

Last Wednesday we had our 52nd meetup at Docker HQ, but this time we joined forces with the Prometheus user group to host a mega-meetup! There was a great turnout and members were excited to see the talks on using Docker with Prometheus, OpenTracing and the new Docker playground; play-with-docker.

First up was Stephen Day, a Senior Software Engineer at Docker, who presented a talk entitled, ‘The History of Metrics According to Me’. Stephen believes that metrics and monitoring should be built into every piece of software we create, from the ground up. By solving the hard parts of application metrics in Docker, he thinks it becomes more likely that metrics are a part of your services from the start. See the video of his intriguing talk and slides below.

‘The History of Metrics According to Me’ @stevvooe talking #metrics and #monitoring at the #Docker SF #meetup! @prometheusIO @CloudNativeFdn pic.twitter.com/6hk0yAtats

— Docker (@docker) December 15, 2016

Next up was Ben Sigelman, an expert in distributed tracing, whose talk ‘OpenTracing Isn’t Just Tracing: Measure Twice, Instrument Once’ was both informative and humorous. He Continue reading

The Linux Migration: Initial Progress Report

About 4 years ago, I discussed some changes in the Apple ecosystem that might lead me to move away from OS X. To be honest, I’ve made only token efforts since that time to actually migrate away, even though the forces that I described in that post are still in full effect. In fact, some might say that the “iOS-ification” of OS X (now rebranded as “macOS”) is even stronger now. As a result, I’ve stepped up my work on a Linux migration, and I’m happy to report that I’ve made some progress.

Here’s a quick update on where things stand so far.

Linux Distribution

I’ve looked at a fair number of Linux distributions. I tried Elementary OS, which some have raved about but which I found too simplistic. I also went back and looked again at Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint. Given that Ubuntu is itself derived from Debian, I also took a look at Debian “Jessie”. Finally, I tested Fedora 25. For a number of reasons—which I’ll describe in more detail in a moment—I’ve settled on Ubuntu 16.04.

So, why Ubuntu 16.04 “Xenial Xerus”? Keep in mind that the reasons I list below are my Continue reading

Announcing Federal Security and Compliance Controls for Docker Datacenter

Continue reading

Hiding the User List on the Ubuntu Login Screen

In this post, I’m going to share how to hide the user list on the login screen for Ubuntu 16.04. The information here isn’t necessarily new or ground-breaking; however, in searching for the solution myself I found a lot of conflicting information as to how this may or may not be accomplished. I’m publishing this post in the hopes of providing a bit more clarity around this topic.

I’ve verified that this procedure works on the desktop distribution of Ubuntu 16.04. Note also that this is probably not the only way of making this work; it’s likely there are other ways of accomplishing the same thing.

To make configuration changes to the login screen, you’ll want to add configuration files to /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d. I used a single file to hide the user list and disable guest logins; presumably, you could use separate files for each configuration directive.

To disable the user list and disallow guest logins, add this content to a file in the etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d directory (I used the filename 00-hide-user-list.conf):

[SeatDefaults]
greeter-hide-users=true
greeter-show-manual-login=true
allow-guest=false

Once this file is in place, you’ll need to either restart your Ubuntu system, or restart the LightDM Continue reading