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:

• Email
• 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:

1. 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…

2. 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.

3. 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 on Windows Continue reading

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:

1. 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

2. 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

Announcing Docker Global Mentor Week 2016

Building on the the success of the Docker Birthday #3 Celebration and Training events earlier this year, we’re excited to announce the Docker Global Mentor Week November 14-19, 2016. 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.

The Docker Global Mentor Week is your opportunity to either #learndocker or help others #learndocker. Participants will work through self paced labs that will be available through an online Learning Management System (LMS). We’ll have different labs for beginners and intermediate users, Developers and Ops and Linux or Windows users.

Are you an advanced Docker user?

We are recruiting a network of mentors to help guide learners work through the labs. Mentors will be invited to attend local events to help answer questions attendees may have while completing the self-paced beginner and intermediate labs. To help mentors prepare for their events, we’ll be sharing the content of the labs and hosting a Q&A session with the Docker team before the start of the global mentor week.

Sign up as a Mentor!

With over 250 Docker Continue reading

Docker Announces Expansion To China Through Commercial Partnership with Alibaba Cloud

The containerization movement fueled by Docker has extended across all geographic boundaries since the very beginning. Some of Docker’s earliest success stories were from Chinese based, web-scale companies running Docker in production before Docker had released its 1.0 version. Additionally, through the grass roots efforts of the development community, we have thriving Docker Meetups in 20 of China’s largest cities. This is a testament to the innovative spirit within the Chinese developer community because the ability to deliver great community content from Docker Hub has been highly constrained. That is why a partnership with China’s largest public cloud provider is so significant. Docker, in concert with Alibaba Cloud, is going to deliver a China-based instance of Docker Hub to ensure optimal access and performance to the thousands of Dockerized images that will serve as the foundation of a new generation of distributed applications in China.  

In addition to formally providing Dockerized content on Docker Hub to China, Docker is commercially partnering with Alibaba to address the substantial demand for running enterprise applications in containers.  A June 2016 Alibaba Cloud survey indicates that more than 80% respondents are already using or plan to use containers. Together Alibaba Cloud and Continue reading

Announcing DockerCon 2017

The Docker Team is excited to announce the next DockerCon will be in held in Austin, Texas from April 17-20. For anyone not in an event planning role, finding a venue is always an adventure. Finding a venue for a unique event such as DockerCon adds an extra layer of complexity. After inquiring on over 15 venues and visiting 3 cities, we are confident that we have chosen a great venue for DockerCon 2017 and the Docker community.

DockerCon US 2017: Austin

April 17-20, 2017

Between the lively tech community, amazing restaurants and culture, Austin will be a natural fit for DockerCon. A diverse range of companies such as Dell, Whole Foods Market, Rackspace, HomeAway and many more of the hottest IT startups call Austin home. We can’t wait to welcome back many returning DockerCon alumni as well as open the DockerCon doors to so many new attendees and companies in the Austin area.

One of the most exciting additions to the DockerCon program is an extra day of content! We reviewed every attendee survey from Seattle in June, debriefed with Docker Captains and others in the community and came to the overwhelming conclusion that two days was not enough Continue reading

Technology Short Take #72

Welcome to Technology Short Take #72. Normally, I try to publish these on Fridays, but some personal travel prevented that this time around so I’m publishing on a Monday instead. Enough of that, though…bring on the content! As usual, here’s my random collection of links, articles, and thoughts about various data center technologies.

Networking

• Charles Min-Cheng Chan has a write-up on using IPv6 in Mininet.
• How’s this for Technology Short Take inception—in TST #70, I mentioned the Cumulus topology converter. That prompted Cody Bunch to write this article on setting up a topology with BGP on Linux using the topology converter, which I’m now mentioning in this Technology Short Take. (Does your head hurt yet?)
• PowerShell on Cumulus Linux on a network switch? Pete Lumbis shows you how. (There are some very interesting implications around this combination, but I’ll reserve that for a future discussion.)
• Someone pointed me toward this article on using Sophos UTM for remote access to their home lab.
• Lindsay Hill recently took Simon Wardley’s pioneers/settlers/town planners (PST) model—which is itself based on Cringely’s Accidental Empires book and the commandos/infantry/police model—and applied to it the networking industry. It’s a really good read and Continue reading

Docker Weekly Roundup | October 2, 2016

This week, our readers enjoyed some big Docker news, including the release of InfraKit, a toolkit for declarative infrastructure, a Windows 10 container guide, and a new open source project Image2Docker. As we begin a new week, let’s recap our top 5 most-read stories for the week of October 2, 2016:

• InfraKit is a new declarative management toolkit for orchestrating infrastructure. InfraKit’s simple, pluggable components for a declarative infrastructure state, actively monitor and automatically reconcile that state.

• Windows Server Container guide is designed to get setup to run Docker Windows Containers on Windows 10 or using a Windows Server 2016 VM.

• Docs Repo On GitHub is a consolidation of all Docker documentation into a single Pages-based repository on GitHub. All documentation for Docker projects will now be open sourced for an easier than ever way to contribute to and stage the public docs.

• Image2Docker is a new tool for prototyping Windows VM conversions to show how to replicate a VM Image to a container. The Powershell module can point at a virtual hard disk image, scan for common Windows components and suggest a Dockerfile.

• Docker Compose Story is a tool for defining and running your multi-container Docker applications. Applications Continue reading

Top 5 Docker Questions from Microsoft Ignite

Last week was busy for the Docker team at Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta. With the exciting announcement about the next evolution of the Docker and Microsoft relationship, the availability of Docker for Windows Server 2016 workloads, the show floor, general session, keynotes, and breakout sessions were all abuzz about Docker for Windows. Whether you were attended or not we want to make sure you didn’t miss a thing, here are the key announcements at this year’s Microsoft Ignite:

• Docker Doubles Container Market with Support for Windows Workloads
• Availability of Docker For Windows Server 2016
• Docker Commercially Supported Docker Engine available in Windows Server 2016

Cool @VisualStudio and @docker integration being demoed by @shanselman at #MSIgnite auto creation of Dockerfiles & debug inside containers. pic.twitter.com/HVDHKmwRrL

— Marcus Robinson (@techdiction) September 26, 2016

Wow @Docker engine included with all Server 2016 deployments. #MSIgnite #keynote

— Joe Kelly (@_JoeKelly_) September 26, 2016

Here our top 5 questions heard in the Docker booth:

1. What are containers?

While container technology had been around for more than a decade. However, as the leader in the containerization market, .Docker has made the technology usable and accessible to all developers and sysadmins. . Containers allow developers Continue reading

Ansible Container 0.2.0 Release

We’re excited to announce the release of Ansible Container 0.2.0. The last few months have been exciting. We’ve been working at a fever pitch to add new features, build examples, and resolve issues, while at the same time we’ve seen the interest level and participation rate of the project steadily grow. It’s been amazing, and we’re grateful to all those that helped by opening issues, contributing code, and spreading the word. Thank you!

Throughout this release cycle we heard from a number of users that being able to reuse existing Ansible content was critical. We focused on that, making Ansible roles a key part of this release. We came up with several enhancements that make it easy to access existing Ansible roles during the container build process. We added a feature to assist in retrofitting existing roles to be ‘container aware' and we looked to the future and imagined new ways roles could enhance the process of building and sharing containers.

Accessing Existing Roles

We heard several times that incorporating existing Ansible roles into the container build process needed to be easier. We solved this by creating a method for accessing roles from the local file system as Continue reading