The Future of Automation
Automation is a hot topic. And the automation concept that has captured our imagination the most is the idea of self-driving cars. This is the kind of automation that we can see dramatically changing what we do everyday, within grasp in our lifetime.
The automotive industry, the press, and parents of 16 year-olds will tell you that the promise of self-driving cars is all about societal benefits: people make mistakes, people don’t always have the best information, and people have to drive with…other people. We can keep everybody safe if everybody just moves to self-driving cars.
But I believe that the benefits of automation are actually much more personal. It’s about getting your life back. Let’s let the computers do the tasks that are mundane and that we shouldn’t be spending time on - like waiting in traffic - so that way we can focus on the things that are important to us.
Automation is intensely personal. It’s not necessarily for the organization, although it it does help. And it’s not just for efficiency’s sake or business sake. At the end of the day, it’s really about helping people.
Automation sometimes gets a bad rap because people think, “Well, if I automate my Continue reading
Get to Know the Docker Datacenter Networking Updates
The latest release of Docker Datacenter (DDC) on Docker Engine 1.12 brings many new networking features that were designed with service discovery and high availability in mind. As organizations continue their journey towards modernizing legacy apps and microservices architectures, these new features were created to address modern day infrastructure demands. DDC builds on and extends the built-in orchestration capabilities including declarative services, scheduling, networking and security features of Engine 1.12. In addition to these new features, we published a new Reference Architecture to help guide you in designing and implementing this for your unique application requirements.
Among the new features in DDC are:
- DNS for service discovery
- Automatic internal service load balancing
- Cluster-wide transport-layer (L4) load balancing
- Cluster-wide application-layer (L7) load balancing using the new HTTP Routing Mesh (HRM) experimental feature
When creating a microservice architecture where services are often decoupled and communicated using APIs, there is an intrinsic need for many of these services to know how to communicate with each other. If a new service is created, how will it know where to find the other services it needs to communicate with? As a service needs to be scaled, what mechanism can be used for Continue reading
DockerCon Returns to Europe in 2017
DockerCon is making its return to Europe next year! DockerCon Europe will be held in the beautiful city of Copenhagen, Denmark at Bella Center Cope
nhagen from October 16 – October 18, 2017. We plan on opening the week on Monday, October 16 with paid trainings and workshops, then General Session will kick off the conference the morning of Tuesday October 17 and the conference will continue through Wednesday October 18.
Three reasons why we are excited about DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen
- On behalf of the entire Docker team, it’s safe to say that we cannot wait to reunite with the Docker Community in Europe under one roof again! Local Docker Meetup chapters take place every week to fuel the community enthusiasm, but there is something special about coming together for DockerCon and collaborating, learning and networking as a big group.
- Recently remodeled in 2014/2015, the Bella Center Copenhagen is an ultra-modern event space featuring Scandinavian design throughout including open space with lots of indoor greenery. Bella Center Copenhagen is also one of the most sustainable venues in the world. They practice waste sorting in 16 categories, have an 850 kW wind turbine on-site for energy, as well as Continue reading
Exciting news from CheConf
Eclipse Che is a developer workspace server and cloud IDE. With Che, you can define a workspace with the project code files and all of their dependencies necessary to edit, build, run, and debug them. You can share your workspaces with other team members. And Che drives Codenvy, cloud workspaces for development teams, with access control and other features.
Today in the keynote at CheConf 2016, Tyler Jewell made several Docker related announcements.
- Che runs on your machine as a Docker container, and generates other containers for workspaces making it a fully Dockerized IDE.
- Docker now powers the Che CLI, including most Che utilities like IP lookup, curl, compiling Che, versioning, launching.
- Che has added support for Docker Compose files in workspaces, making it really easy to write and debug Compose-based applications, right in Che.
- Che agents, such as SSH or language servers for intellisense, are deployed as containers.
- Chedir is a command line utility for converting source repos into Dockerized workspaces.
- Che is now available in the Docker Store.
- Codenvy is packaged as a set of Docker containers. With docker-compose up you start up ten docker containers that run Codenvy on your network.
- Codenvy Continue reading
Introducing Image Signing Policy in Docker Datacenter
My colleague colleague Ying Li and I recently blogged about Securing the Software Supply Chain and drew the analogy between traditional physical supply chains and the creation, building, and deployment involved in a software supply chain. We believe that a software pipeline that can be verified at every stage is an important step in raising the security bar for all software, and we didn’t stop at simply presenting the idea.
Integrated Content Trust and Image Signing Policy
In the recent release of Docker Datacenter, we announced a new feature that starts to brings these security capabilities together along the software supply chain. Built on Notary, a signing infrastructure based on The Update Framework (TUF), along with Docker Content Trust (DCT), an integration of the Notary toolchain into the Docker client, DDC now allows administrators to set up signing policies that prevent untrusted content from being deployed.
In this release of DDC, the Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) now also ships with integrated Notary services. This means you’re ready to start using DCT and the new Signing Policy features out of the box! No separate server and database to install, configure and connect to the registry.
Bringing it all together
Image Continue reading
Docker Datacenter adds enterprise orchestration, security policy and refreshed UI
Today we are excited to introduce new additions to Docker Datacenter, our Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for enterprise IT and application teams. Docker Datacenter provides an integrated platform for developers and IT operations teams to collaborate securely on the application lifecycle. Built on the foundation of Docker Engine, Docker Datacenter (DDC) also provides integrated orchestration, management and security around managing resources like access, images, applications, networks and more across the cluster.
This latest release of Docker Datacenter includes a number of new features and improvements focused in the following areas:
- Enterprise orchestration and operations to make running and operating multi container applications simple, secure and scalable
- Integrated end to end security to cover all of the components and people that interact with the application pipeline
- User experience and performance improvements ensure that even the most complex operations are handled efficiently
Let’s dig into some of the new features.
Enterprise orchestration with backward compatibility
This release of Docker Datacenter not only integrates the built in orchestration capabilities of Docker Engine 1.12 utilizing swarm mode and services, but also provides backwards compatibility for standalone containers using the docker run commands. To help enterprise application teams migrate, it is important Continue reading
Docker Online Meetup #46: Introduction to InfraKit
In case you missed it, Solomon Hykes (Docker Founder and CTO) open sourced InfraKit during his keynote address at LinuxCon Europe in Berlin last month. InfraKit is a declarative management toolkit for orchestrating infrastructure built by two Docker core team engineers, David Chung and Bill Farner. Read this blog post to learn more about InfraKit origins, internals and plugins including groups, instances and flavors.
There are many ways you can participate in the development of the project and influence the roadmap:
- Star the project on GitHub to follow issues and development
- Help define and implement new and interesting plugins
- Instance plugins to support different infrastructure providers
- Flavor plugins to support a variety of systems like etcd or mysql clusters
- Group controller plugins like metrics-driven auto scaling and more
- Help define interfaces and implement new infrastructure resource types for things like load balancers, networks and storage volume provisioners
Check out the InfraKit repository README for more info, a quick tutorial and to start experimenting — from plain files to Terraform integration to building a Zookeeper Continue reading
Docker at Tech Field Day 12
Docker will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12, and you can sit in on the sessions – at least virtually.
Tech Field Day is an opportunity for IT practitioners to hear from some of the leading technology companies, and Docker is excited to be participating again. Many thanks to Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth for cultivating a vibrant community of technical leaders and evangelists and inviting us to participate. Looking forward to meeting more of the delegates.
Our session will be Wednesday, November 16th, from 4:30 to 6:30pm Pacific. We have a full slate of topics including:
- Docker Datacenter: What is Docker Datacenter and how can it help organizations implement their own Container as a Service platform.
- Docker for Windows Server: An overview of the integration of Docker containers and Windows Server 2016.
- Docker for AWS and Docker for Azure: Learn about the easiest way to deploy and manage clusters of Docker hosts on both Azure and AWS.
- Docker Security: We’ll discuss how to implement a secure software supply chain with Docker.
- Docker Networking: A conversation on how Docker allows developers to define container centric networks that run on top of your existing infrastructure.
New Dockercast episode and interview with Docker Captain Laura Frank
We recently had the opportunity to catch up with the amazing Laura Frank. Laura is a developer focused on making tools for other developers.As an engineer at Codeship, she works on improving the Docker infrastructure and overall experience for users on Codeship. Previously, she worked on several open source projects to support Docker in the early stages of the project, including Panamax and ImageLayers. She currently lives in Berlin.
Laura is also a Docker Captain, a distinction that Docker awards select members of the community that are experts in their field and passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others.
As we do with all of these podcasts, we begin with a little bit of history of “How did you get here?” Then we dive into the Codeship offering and how it optimizes its delivery flow by using Docker containers for everything. We then end up with a “What’s the coolest Docker story you have?” I hope you enjoy – please feel free to comment and leave suggestions.
In addition to the questions covered in the podcast, we’ve had the chance to ask Laura for a couple additional questions below.
How has Docker impacted what you Continue reading
An Introduction to the VirtualBox CLI
This post provides a basic introduction to the VirtualBox CLI (command-line interface) tool, vboxmanage. This post does not attempt to replace the comprehensive documentation; rather, its purpose is to help users who are new to vboxmanage (such as myself, having recently adopted VirtualBox for my Vagrant environments) get somewhat up to speed as quickly and as painlessly as possible.
Basic Commands
Let’s start with some basic operations. Here are a few to get you started:
-
To list all the registered VMs, simply run
vboxmanage list vms. Note that if you are using Vagrant with VirtualBox, this command will also show VirtualBox VMs that have been instantiated by Vagrant. Similarly, if you are using Docker Machine with VirtualBox, this command will show you VMs created by Docker Machine. -
To list all the running VMs, use
vboxmanage list runningvms. -
To start a VM, run
vboxmanage startvm <name or UUID>. You can optionally specify a--typeparameter to control how the VM is started. Using--type guiwill show it via the host GUI; using--type headlessmeans you’ll need to interact over the network (typically via SSH). To emulate Vagrant/Docker Machine-like behavior, you’d use--type headless. -
Once a VM is Continue reading
Thinking Out Loud: The Future of Kubernetes
I’ve just wrapped up KubeCon/CloudNativeCon 2016 in Seattle, WA. There’s no doubt the Kubernetes community is active and engaged, and the project itself is charging forward. As both the community and the project grow, though, what does that mean for the future of Kubernetes?
Here are my thoughts, hopefully presented in a somewhat logical fashion.
It seems to me that Kubernetes has been successful thus far because of a strong focus on the problem it’s trying to solve. You can see this in the Kubernetes web site, where phrases like “Production-Grade Container Orchestration” and “Automated container deployment, scaling, and management” are found. You can see this in the API abstractions Kubernetes uses (a pod as a group of co-located containers, a service as a stable access point for sets of pods, etc.). You can see it in the real-world customer deployments and use cases. Kubernetes seems focused on addressing the needs of container-based microservices-centric application architectures.
However, there now seem to be some efforts to push Kubernetes to support other types of applications as well. One could look at DaemonSets (which are used to ensure that a particular pod is always running on every node; useful for “infrastructure” services Continue reading
Voting with Docker: A little break from the election
You may have heard, there’s an election for president (and many other posts) going on in the US today. For those who already voted, who want a break from voting, or just want to create a new quiz for their friends, we have the Docker Example Voting App. And we’ve even created a poll to help you figure out the best quiz to make.
Which #Docker voting app face off would you select? #TwitterPoll #ElectionDay
— Docker (@docker) November 8, 2016
The voting app was created to showcase a number of features of Docker:
- Polyglot development environments: The app has Python, Node.js, and .NET code, as well as Redis and Postgres services.
- Easy deployment of a multi-service app with Docker Compose.
- Easy Docker Networking.
All this using a simple $ docker-compose up.
The Example Voting App has been really popular at Docker events like the Docker 3rd birthday, and in our Docker Labs repository, which has a lot of example applications and tutorials. And recently, Docker Captain Alex Ellis ported the app to Windows Containers using:
- IIS
- ASP.NET
- .NET 4.5.1
- Microsoft SQL Server (2016)
So if you want a break from the election, check out our poll Continue reading
Docker San Francisco Meetup #50: Swarm Mode
Last Wednesday was Docker’s 50th meetup in San Francisco! There was an awesome turnout from the local Docker community to see Docker’s own Nishant Totla and Dongluo Chen and their talk on Swarm Mode.
Nishant and Dongluo gave a talk entitled ‘Using Docker Swarm Mode and healthchecks to Deploy Applications Without Loss’ where they demonstrated how to do service upgrades without impacting your application.
They explained that Docker swarm mode enables users to manage their applications with service primitives and the healthcheck feature provides health indications for a container. Coming up in the Docker 1.13 release, Docker Swarm can connect healthcheck results with load balancers to implement no-loss service upgrade. Check out the talk including Nishant’s demo in the video below.
Want to learn more about the Docker platform and Docker’s open source projects?
- Join us for the next Docker Online Meetup (Wed, Nov 9th at 9:30am PST) with Bill Farner and David Chung covering InfraKit: A toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure.
- Save your seat for our next webinar on Docker Datacenter (Wed, Nov 16th at 10am PST) and learn how it enables enterprise application teams to embrace cloud strategies, application modernization and DevOps.
New blog post w/ Continue reading
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