Docker Weekly Roundup | October 30, 2016
This week, we delve into the top considerations for running Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V, the suite of Docker security tools available and the three steps required to get MSBuild in Docker. As we begin a new week, let’s recap our top five most-read stories for the week of October 30, 2016:
- Docker For Windows Server With Hyper-V – top considerations for running Docker for Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V VM to understand how they can work together.
- Docker Security – an overview of the suite of tools available to help secure a container and their range of enhancements built into the Docker platform by Benjamin Wootton.
- MSBuild With Docker – three steps needed to get MSBuild in a Docker container and have it build an ASP.NET WebAPI application with Windows Containers by Alex Ellis.
- Docker Enterprise Case Studies – five application case studies covering everything from legacy processes to CI/CD pipelines and how Docker helped reduce customer cost, complexity and chaos.
- AWS, Docker, And Deep Learning – a method to speed the digital artist transformation, by relying on an artificial intelligence system. AI system is based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images Continue reading
Your Docker Agenda for November 2016
November is packed with plenty of great events including over 75 Docker Global Mentor Week local events to learn all about Docker! This global event series aims to provide Docker training to both newcomers and intermediate Docker users. More advanced users will have the opportunity to get involved as mentors to further encourage connection and collaboration within the community. Check out the list of confirmed events below to see if there is one happening near you. Make sure to check back as we’ll be updating this list as more events are announced.
Want to help us organize a Mentor Week training in your city? Email us at [email protected] for more information!
Official Docker Training Courses
View the full schedule of instructor led training courses here!
Introduction to Docker:
This is a two-day, on-site or classroom-based training course which introduces you to the Docker platform and takes you through installing, integrating, and running it in your working environment.
Nov 15-16: Introduction to Docker with Amazic – Nieuw-Vennep, The Netherlands
Nov 24-25: Introduction to Docker with Docker Captain Benjamin Continue reading
Steve Singh Joins Docker’s Board of Directors
The whole team at Docker would like to welcome Steve Singh, CEO of Concur and Member of SAP’s Executive Board to the Docker family. Steve has accepted a role on Docker’s Board of Directors, bringing his deep experience in building world-class organizations. Steve leads the SAP Business Networks & Applications Group, which brings together teams from Ariba, Fieldglass, Concur, SAP Health, Business Data Network and SMP ERP groups. We had a chance to sit down with Steve to get his thoughts on his appointment to the Docker Board.
How and why did you initially become involved with Docker?
I was certainly aware of Docker. There were also a number of groups across SAP that were using Docker. When a member of the Docker board approached me about joining the company’s Board of Directors, I learned a fair bit more about the market opportunity Docker was pursuing and could easily see the importance of the Docker suite for corporate IT and ISV’s. I was also intrigued by the opportunity to support Ben and Solomon in building an enduring business.
What led you to joining Docker’s board?
For me, there are two requirements when considering board roles. The first question I Continue reading
Security and Delegation with Ansible Tower, Part 1
This is part of a series of posts about how Ansible and Ansible Tower enable you to manage your infrastructure simply, securely, and efficiently.
When we talk about Tower, we often talk in terms of control, knowledge, and delegation. But what does that mean? In previous posts in this series, we've talked about the concept of 'control', as it relates to both managing your infrastructure and managing your automation. Today we're going to explain delegation, and the security aspects that go into that.
DELEGATION - THE BASICS
Ansible Playbooks, out of the box, are pretty simple - you run Ansible as a particular user, you pass it whatever inventory you want to manage, and it uses whatever credentials the executing user happens to have on hand. This is great for getting automating quickly, but what if you want to delegate automation to someone else to run as needed? You need to provide an inventory file for Ansible and Playbook to them (hopefully they don't edit them), and give them credentials (hopefully they won't use them for something else).That's where the control, knowledge, and delegation features of Ansible Tower come into play.
STEP 1: CREDENTIALS
Ansible Tower securely stores credentials for Continue readingAnsible 2.2 Network Updates
The Slack channel question seemed so innocuous at the time, “I was reviewing through the Ansible 2.2 commits related to networking. Is there a summary of the networking items that are new in 2.2?”
In a rather quick response, my first answer seemed so obvious, “Not really, mostly simplifying code, merging template with config modules and some new platforms."
As the conversation continued though, reality came crashing down with the realization that the sprint from Ansible 2.1 to Ansible 2.2 for networking modules was substantially more than a few tweaks and added platforms.
Before getting into what’s new and what’s changed, let's review the overall state of network integration with Ansible. We started this journey just about a year ago announcing that Ansible would start supporting direct integration with network devices. At the time, this was a fairly big departure from the more traditional roots where Ansible has focused on in the systems and application development worlds. There always seemed to be a natural fit between Ansible’s agentless, SSH-based architecture’s ability to adapt to automating traditional network device configurations. It didn’t take long for the initial integration of network modules to start achieving greater adoption.
In just three releases (counting Continue reading
5 Tales from the Docker Crypt
(Cue the Halloween music)
Welcome to my crypt. This is the Docker crypt keeper speaking and I’ll be your spirit guide on your journey through the dangerous and frightening world of IT applications. Today you will learn about 5 spooky application stories covering everything from cobweb covered legacy processes to shattered CI/CD pipelines. As these stories unfold, you will hear how Docker helped banish cost, complexity and chaos.
Tale 1 – “Demo Demons”
Splunk was on a mission to enable their employees and partners across the globe to deliver demos of their software regardless of where they’re located in the world, and have each demo function consistently. These business critical demos include everything from Splunk security, to web analytics and IT service intelligence. This vision proved to be quite complex to execute. At times their SEs would be in customer meetings, but their demos would sometimes fail. They needed to ensure that each of their 30 production demos within their Splunk Oxygen demo platform could live forever in eternal greatness.
To ensure their demos were working smoothly with their customers, Splunk uses Docker Datacenter, our on-premises solution that brings container management and deployment services to the enterprise via an integrated platform. Images are Continue reading
Considerations for Running Docker for Windows Server 2016 with Hyper-V VMs
We often get asked at Docker, “Where should I run my application? On bare metal, virtual or cloud?” The beauty of Docker is that you can run a container anywhere, so we usually answer this question with “It depends.” Not what you were looking for, right?
To answer this, you first need to consider which infrastructure makes the most sense for your application architecture and business goals. We get this question so often that our technical evangelist, Mike Coleman has written a few blogs to provide some guidance:
- To Use Physical Or To Use Virtual: That Is The Container Deployment Question
- So, When Do You Use A Container Or VM?
During our recent webinar, titled “Docker for Windows Server 2016”, this question came up a lot, specifically what to consider when deploying a Windows Server 2016 application in a Hyper-V VM with Docker and how it works. First, you’ll need to understand the differences between Windows Server containers, Hyper-V containers, and Hyper-V VMs before considering how they work together.
A Hyper-V container is a Windows Server container running inside a stripped down Hyper-V VM that is only instantiated for containers.
This provides additional kernel isolation and separation from Continue reading
Docker Weekly Roundup | October 23, 2016
The last week of October 2016 is over and you know what that means; another Docker news roundup. Highlights include Windows workloads with Image2Docker, part four of the SwarmKit series, and a Docker InfraKit test-drive! As we begin a new week, let’s recap our five top stories:
- Windows Workloads with Image2Docker – a community supported and designed project to demonstrate the ease of creating Windows Containers from existing servers. Interested parties are encouraged to fork it, play with it and contribute pull requests back to the community.
- SwarmKit – Part 4 – a tutorial series on Docker SwarmKit led by Gabriel Schenker. Part four of the series explains how to create a swarm in the cloud and run a sample application on it.
- Docker Volumes – user instructions on how to make sure posts and images stay permanent via Docker volumes, even with an upgrade to a container image, as showcased by Alex Ellis.
- InfraKit Test-Drive – a detailed illustration of a sample Docker image created to demonstrate InfraKit’s self-healing operation via Ajeet Raina.
- Testing Swarm on Raspberry Pi – a screencast of Docker swarm and how it’s able to recover from failure of an ethernet interface. Continue reading
What’s New in Tower 3: Search
In July, we released Ansible Tower 3. In this blog series, we will take a deeper dive into Tower changes designed to make our product simpler and easier to scale Ansible automation across your environments. In our last post, our Principal Software Engineer Matt Jones highlighted what’s new for Tower 3 notifications.
If you’d like to learn more about the release, our Director of Product Bill Nottingham wrote a complete overview of the Tower 3 updates.
Simplifying Search
Tower gives you the ability to manage the use of Ansible for an entire enterprise, allowing you to potentially manage hundreds of Playbooks and thousands of hosts in a single place. Tower also gives you the ability to audit all types of usage through its integrated activity stream, which can be verbose. One of the goals of Tower 3 was to provide a consistent and full-featured user interface for dealing with these large collections of data.
In Tower 2, searching these collections was pretty limited. You could only make a single query for a particular collection. In Tower 3, we developed and implemented a tag-based searching system throughout the app, allowing you to chain multiple queries together so that you can quickly Continue reading
Containerize Windows workloads with Image2Docker
Yesterday, we held a packed webinar on using the Image2Docker tool that prototypes shifting a legacy Windows virtual machine to a Windows Container Dockerfile.
Image2Docker is an open source, community generated powershell module that searches for common components of a Windows Server VM and generates a Dockerfile to match. Originally created by Docker Captain Trevor Sullivan, it is now an open source tool hosted in our GitHub repository. Currently there is discovery of components such IIS, Apache, SQL Server and more. As an input it supports VHD, VHDX, and WIM files. When paired with Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Converter, you can start with pretty much any VM format.
Image2Docker is community supported and designed to show you how easy it is to create Windows Containers from your existing servers. We strongly encourage you to fork it, play with it and contribute pull requests back to the community. Or just install it and use it to generate your own Dockerfiles.
Watch the on-demand webinar to learn more about how it was built, how to use it, and how to contribute.
Here are some of the most popular questions from the sessions with answers.
Is it possible to containerize an application Continue reading
Managing AWS Infrastructure with Ansible
In this post, I’m going to discuss some concepts behind managing your Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure using Ansible. Ansible is a very popular tool for configuring operating system instances and software; using the concepts and examples provided in this post would allow you to expand your use of Ansible to include—when using AWS—the creation and deletion of the operating system instances themselves, as well as related infrastructure components (like security groups or other services).
Preface
Before I continue, I’d like to first discuss the “fit” of using Ansible for this particular purpose. Ansible doesn’t store the state of managed systems. Perhaps this is due to the agentless architecture; I don’t know. What that means in this particular use case is that you must take other steps to store information you’ll absolutely need like instance IDs, security group IDs, and the like because Ansible itself doesn’t. In my mind, this makes Ansible a less-than-ideal tool for this particular use case. That doesn’t mean Ansible isn’t a good tool; it just means that Ansible may not be the best tool for this particular purpose. (Think of it like this: Yes, you can sometimes unscrew something using a knife, but a screwdriver Continue reading
Even more Docker Labs!
Since we launched Docker Labs back in May, we’ve had a lot of interest. So we keep adding more and improving the labs that we have. We now have 22 hands on labs for you to choose from, ranging from beginner tutorials to much more advanced ones. Here’s a peek at what we have:
- To accompany the launch of Windows containers in Microsoft Windows Server 2016, we launched a Windows Container beginner tutorial to walk you through setting up your environment, running basic containers and creating a basic Docker Compose multi-container application using Windows containers.
- We added 6 security tutorials to take advantage of some of Docker’s strong security features.
- A Docker community member liked our Java debugging tutorials so much, he translated our labs into Spanish.
- We added a new Node.js tutorial to show how to easily you can debug Node.js applications live in container.
So check out Docker Labs to learn more about using Docker. And as always, we really encourage contributions. So if you have a lab you want to get out there, or find a way to improve what we have, please contribute today.
The post Even more Docker Labs! appeared first on Docker Blog.
What’s New in Tower 3: Notifications
In July, we released Ansible Tower 3. In this blog series, we will take a deeper dive into Tower changes that were all designed to make our product simpler and easier to scale Ansible automation across your environments. In our last post, Jared Tabor, Ansible Tower Software Engineer, highlights what's new in the Tower 3 user interface.
If you’d like to learn more about the release, our Director of Product Bill Nottingham for wrote a complete overview of the Ansible Tower 3 updates.
Introducing Tower Notifications
One of the exciting new features of Ansible Tower 3 is notifications. Tower notifications provide a mechanism of signaling when Tower jobs succeed or fail. This can take the form of sending a message to a Slack channel or sending an HTTP POST to another service to trigger other actions.
In Tower 3 we support the following notification types:
- Slack
- Hipchat
- Pagerduty
- Twilio
- IRC
- Webhook (POST)
Concepts
There are two important concepts to understand when it comes to notifications in Tower.
1. Notification Templates
These define the properties of where a notification will be sent and who will get notified. If you are using the Slack notification type, then this will include the token and Continue reading
Vagrant-Photon OS Bug and Workaround
I recently came across a bug in using VMware Photon OS with Vagrant, and so in this post I’m going to point out this bug and provide a workaround. The bug is, fortunately, pretty innocuous, and only affects Vagrant environments that configure additional network interfaces to Photon OS VMs. The workaround is equally easy, thankfully.
First, I’ll point out that the fix for this bug has already been pushed to Vagrant, but it hasn’t yet (as of this writing) made it into a release. Vagrant 1.8.6 was the latest release of this writing, and it still exhibits the bug.
There are a number of somewhat-interrelated issues:
-
First, the “vagrant-guests-photon” Vagrant plugin (latest version is 1.0.4) is no longer needed. This code has been replaced by code that is distributed as part of Vagrant itself. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, except that…
-
The plugin relies on
awk, which is no longer included in recent releases of the Photon OS Vagrant box. I can’t tell you exactly when this started, but I can confirm the last couple of releases (1.2.0 and 1.2.1) are definitely affected. -
Finally, the code which replaces the Continue reading
Webinar Recap: Docker for Windows Server 2016
Last week, we held our first webinar on “Docker for Windows Server 2016” to a record number of attendees, showcasing the most exciting new Windows Server 2016 feature – containers powered by Commercially Supported Docker Engine.
Docker CS Engine and containers are now available natively on Windows and supported by Microsoft with Docker’s Commercially Supported (CS) Engine included in Windows Server 2016.Now developers and IT pros can begin the same transformation for Windows-based apps and infrastructure to reap the benefits they’ve seen with Docker for Linux: enhanced security, agility, and improved portability and freedom to run applications on bare metal, virtual or cloud environments.
Watch the on-demand webinar to learn more about the technical innovations that went into making Docker containers run natively on Windows and how to get started.
Webinar: Docker for Windows Server 2016
Here are just a few of the most frequently asked questions from the session. We’re still sorting through the rest and will post them in a follow up blog.
Q: How do I get started?
A: Docker and Microsoft have worked to make getting started simple, we have some great resources to get you started whether you’re a developer or an IT pro:
- Complete Continue reading
VMworld EMEA 2016 Day 2 Keynote
This is a liveblog of the day 2 general session at VMworld EMEA 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. I wasn’t able to write a liveblog of the day 1 session due to some scheduling/logistical conflicts, but managed to get things arranged for day 2 (well, most of it—I’ll have to cut this short so I can get to a customer meeting).
At 9am, Sanjay Poonen takes the stage to kick off the general session. Poonen walks through a number of examples how “digital transformation” is affecting businesses and organizations across a variety of industry verticals. Poonen positions Workplace One as the “Switzerland” solution that bridges different kinds of applications (Windows client-server apps, web apps, and mobile apps) with different kinds of devices (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft). The key ingredients of Workspace One are VDI, EMM, and identity.
Poonen quickly transitions into a demo of Workspace One on an iPhone, showing off how VMware employees use Workspace One to run apps like Workday, Concur, ADP, Boxer (VMware’s mobile e-mail client), AirWatch Content Locker, and others. The demo then moves into a demonstration of VDI, including 3-D accelerated graphics, on a Samsung Android tablet. Following the demo, Poonen kicks off a customer testimonial Continue reading
Docker Community Spotlight: Nimret Sandhu
Nimret Sandhu has shown himself to be a key player in the success of the Docker Seattle Meetup group; and now with almost 2000 eager members, organizing engaging events has become quite the responsibility! On top of his busy work schedule at Dev9, his extracurricular activities and a family life, Nimret took the time to tell us his Docker story, his favorite thing about the Docker Community and also departed with some words of wisdom for anyone just starting a meetup group.
Tell us about your first experience with Docker. What drew you to joining as an organizer for the Docker Seattle Meetup group?
My first experience with Docker was when our company, Dev9, looked into partnering with this up-and-coming startup named Docker a couple of years ago. Since I’m a long time *nix user who’s been exposed to solaris zones, bsd jails, etc. in the past, I looked into it, and immediately realized the potential. Once I downloaded and played around with it, I was so blown away by the technology that I started evangelizing it to our clients. I gave a talk on it and volunteered to help out with the Docker Seattle Meetup. I had already been running the Continue reading
Docker Weekly Roundup | October 9, 2016
It’s time for your weekly roundup! Get caught up on the top Docker news including; expansion into China through a commercial partnership with Alibaba Cloud, announcement of DockerCon 2017, and information on the upcoming Global Mentor Week. As we begin a new week, let’s recap the top five most-read stories of the week of October 9, 2016:
- Alibaba Cloud Partnership Docker expands into China market through new partnership with the Alibaba Group, the world’s largest retail commerce group. The focus of the partnership is to provide a China-based Docker Hub, enable Alibaba to resell Docker’s commercial offerings, and create a “Docker For Alibaba Cloud”.
- DockerCon 2017 a three day, conference organized by Docker. This year’s US edition will take place in Austin, TX and continue to build on the success of previous events as it grows and reflects Docker’s established ecosystem and ever-growing community.
- Global Mentor Week is a global event series aimed at providing Docker training to both newcomers and intermediate users. Participants will work through self-paced labs that will be available through an online Learning Management System (LMS). There will be different labs for different skill levels, Developers, Ops, Linux and Windows users.
Docker Distributed System Summit videos & podcast episodes
Following LinuxCon Europe in Berlin last week, we organized a first of its kind Docker event called Docker Distributed Systems Summit. This two day event was an opportunity for core Docker engineers and Docker experts from the community to learn, collaborate, problem-solve and hack around the next generation of distributed systems in areas such as orchestration, networking, security and storage.
More specifically, the goal of the summit was to dive deep into Docker’s infrastructure plumbing tools and internals: SwarmKit, InfraKit, Hyperkit, Notary, libnetwork, IPVS, Raft, TUF and provide attendees with the working knowledge of how to leverage these tools while building their own systems.
We’re happy to share with you all the videos recordings, slides and audio files available as #dockercast episodes!
Youtube playlist
Podcast playlist
All the slides from the summit are available on the official Docker slideshare account.
Please join us in giving a big shout out to our awesome speakers for creating and presenting the following projects:
- InfraKit: A toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure
- Speaker: Bill Farner and David Chung (Docker)
- GitHub repo, Slides, video, podcast and Liveblogging
- Heart of the SwarmKit: Store, Topology Continue reading
Migrating the Runbook – a Journey from Legacy to DevOps
"Just type this invoice up for me will you please?" asked a sheepish looking Malcolm.
"I do have better things to do you know" I replied.
"Yes, yes, I know. But who else is going to do it?"
"Give it here then!"
In the beginning, there was a problem
That was a fairly common interaction for me as a young lad. I was fresh out of school and working my summer in the sales department of a local car dealership. My job was mostly admin related tasks, which up until that point hadn't included doing all the sales guys' typing. Our secretary had recently departed the company, and the sales guys all figured I could happily do the replacement typing jobs. The duty had fallen to me because a) I had the stereotypical 1980s glasses of a nerdy computer kid and b) they all knew I actually was a nerdy computer kid. So fair play to them for assuming I could type, I could.
The thing was I really did have better things to do, and these daily interruptions were eating into my productive time. I wanted that time back; so Continue reading