How To Dockerize Vendor Apps like Confluence
Docker Datacenter customer, Shawn Bower of Cornell University recently shared their experiences in containerizing Confluence as being the start of their Docker journey.
Through that project they were able to demonstrate a 10X savings in application maintenance, reduce the time to build a disaster recovery plan from days to 30 minutes and improve the security profile of their Confluence deployment. This change allowed the Cloudification team that Shawn leads to start spending the majority of their time helping Cornelians to use technology to be innovative.
Since the original blog was posted, there’s been a lot of requests to get the pragmatic info on how Cornell actually did this project. In the post below, Shawn provides detailed instructions on how Confluence is containerized and how the Docker workflow is integrated with Puppet.
Written by Shawn Bower
As we started our Journey to move Confluence to the cloud using Docker we were emboldened by the following post from Atlassian. We use many of the Atlassian products and love how well integrated they are. In this post I will walk you through the process we used to get Confluence in a container and running.
First we needed to craft a Dockerfile. At Cornell Continue reading
A Triple-Provider Vagrant Environment
In this post, I’d like to share with you some techniques I used to build a triple-provider Vagrant environment—that is, a Vagrant environment that will work unmodified with multiple backend providers. In this case, it will work (mostly) unmodified with AWS, VirtualBox, and the VMware provider (tested with Fusion, but should work with Workstation as well). I know this may not seem like a big deal, but it marks something of a milestone for me.
Since I first started using Vagrant a couple of years ago, I’ve—as expected—gotten better and better at leveraging this tool in a flexible way. You can see this in the evolution of the Vagrant environments found in my GitHub “learning-tools” repository, where I went from hard-coded data values to pulling data from external YAML files.
One thing I’d been shooting for was a Vagrantfile that would work with multiple backend providers without any modifications, and tonight I managed to build an environment that works with AWS, VirtualBox, and VMware Fusion. There are still a couple of hard-coded values, but the vast majority of information is pulled from an external YAML file.
Let’s take a look at the Vagrantfile that I created. Here’s Continue reading
Introducing InfraKit, an open source toolkit for creating and managing declarative, self-healing infrastructure
Written by Bill Farner and David Chung
Docker’s mission is to build tools of mass innovation, starting with a programmable layer for the Internet that enables developers and IT operations teams to build and run distributed applications. As part of this mission, we have always endeavored to contribute software plumbing toolkits back to the community, following the UNIX philosophy of building small loosely coupled tools that are created to simply do one thing well. As Docker adoption has grown from 0 to 6 billion pulls, we have worked to address the needs of a growing and diverse set of distributed systems users. This work has led to the creation of many infrastructure plumbing components that have been contributed back to the community.
It started in 2014 with libcontainer and libnetwork. In 2015 we created runC and co-founded OCI with an industry-wide set of partners to provide a standard for container runtimes, a reference implementation based on libcontainer, and notary, which provides the basis for Docker Content Trust. From there we added containerd, a daemon to control runC, built for performance and density. Docker Engine was refactored so that Docker 1.11 is built on top of containerd and runC, providing benefits Continue reading
What’s New in Tower 3: User Interface
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, our Senior Software Engineer Chris Meyers highlights what's new in the Tower 3 installer.
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.
Simplifying the UX
The most common feedback we have received from existing Tower users concerns usability and the need to improve it. The Ansible Tower UI team was tasked to address this, along with new workflows and features, during the development of Tower 3. This was no small task as the team had to change every single page served to the user.
Tower 2.4.5 and earlier versions offered many ways of doing the same thing, often resulting in inconsistent flows and context switching. The team wanted the new interface to reflect how simple Ansible is. So the goal became offering a common flow for interacting with objects in the app and providing more context where possible.
Your Docker agenda for the month of October
From webinars to workshops, meetups to conference talks, check out our list of events that are coming up in October!
Online
Oct 13: Docker for Windows Server 2016 by Michael Friis
Oct 18: Docker Datacenter Demo by Moni Sallama and Chris Hines.
Official Docker Training Course
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.
Oct 11-12: Introduction to Docker with Xebia – Paris, France
Oct 19-20: Introduction to Docker with Contino – London, United Kingdom
Oct 24-25: Introduction to Docker with AKRA – Krakow, Germany
Docker Administration and Operations: The Docker Administration and Operations course consists of both the Introduction to Docker course, followed by the Advanced Docker Topics course, held over four consecutive days.
Oct 3-6: Docker Administration and Operations with Azca – Madrid, Spain
Oct 11-15: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK – Paris, France
Oct 18-21: Docker Administration and Operations with Vizuri – Raleigh, NC
Oct 18-22: Docker Administration and Operations with TREEPTIK – Aix en Provence, France
Oct 24-27: Continue reading
Your Guide to LinuxCon and ContainerCon Europe
Hey Dockers! We had such a great time attending and speaking at LinuxCon and ContainerCon North America, that we are doing it again next week in Berlin – only bigger and better this time! Make sure to come visit us at booth #D38 and check out the awesome Docker sessions we have lined up:
Keynote!
Solomon Hykes, Docker’s Founder and CTO, will kick off LinuxCon with the first keynote at 9:25. If you aren’t joining us in Berlin, you can live stream his and the other keynotes by registering here.
Sessions
Tuesday October 4th:
11:15 – 12:05 Docker Captain Adrian Mouat will deliver a comparison of orchestration tools including Docker Swarm, Mesos/Marathon and Kubernetes.
12:15 – 1:05 Patrick Chanezon and David Chung from Docker’s technical team along with Docker Captain and maintainer Phil Estes will demonstrate how to build distributed systems without Docker, using Docker plumbing projects, including RunC, containerd, swarmkit, hyperkit, vpnkit, datakit.
2:30 – 3:20 Docker’s Mike Goelzer will introduce the audience to Docker Services in Getting Started with Docker Services, explain what they are and how to use them to deploy multi-tier applications. Mike will also cover load balancing, service discovery, scaling, security, deployment Continue reading
Docker Weekly Roundup | September 25, 2016
The last week of September 2016 is over and you know what that means; another Docker news roundup. Highlights include, a new commercial relationship between Docker and Microsoft, general availability of Docker containers on Windows Server 2016, and consolidation of Docker documentation on GitHub! As we begin a new week, let’s recap our five hottest stories:
- Docker and Microsoft Partnership Docker announced a Commercial Partnership with Microsoft that doubles the container market by extending Docker Engine to Windows Server 2016.
- Docker for Windows Server 2016 Microsoft announced general availability of Windows Server 2016, one of the most exciting new aspect of the announcement is that containers on Windows are powered by Docker.
- Containers for Windows a step-by-step guide on containerized workload, the various components, such as the Docker client tools, the Docker daemon, and the virtual machine host for running containers by Bruno Terkaly.
- New Docs Repo on GitHub announcement of consolidation of all Docker documentation into a new single Pages-based repository on GitHub.
- Image2Docker a new prototyping tool created by Docker Captain Trevor Sullivan for Windows VMs that shows how to replicate a VM Image to a Docker container.
Weekly #roundup: Top 5 #Docker stories for the Continue reading
New Dockercast episode with Mano Marks from Docker
In case you missed it, we launched Dockercast, the official Docker Podcast last month including all the DockerCon 2016 sessions available as podcast episodes.
In this podcast, we meet Mano Marks, Director of Developer Relations at Docker. Mano catches us up on a lot of the new cool t
hings that are going on with Docker. We get into the new Docker 1.12 engine/swarm built-in orchestration. We also talk about some cool stuff that is happening with Docker and Windows as well as Raspberry Pi and Docker.
You can find the latest #Dockercast episodes on the Itunes Store or via the SoundCloud RSS feed.
New #dockercast episode w/ host @botchagalupe & our very own @manomarks as a guest!
Click To Tweet
The post New Dockercast episode with Mano Marks from Docker appeared first on Docker Blog.
Image2Docker: A New Tool for Prototyping Windows VM Conversions
Docker is a great tool for building, shipping, and running your applications. Many companies are already moving their legacy applications to Docker containers and now with the introduction of the Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Docker Engine can not run containers natively on Windows.To make it even easier, there’s a new prototyping tool for Windows VMs that shows you how to replicate a VM Image to a container.
Docker Captain Trevor Sullivan recently released the Image2Docker tool, an open source project we’re hosting on GitHub. Still in it’s early stages, Image2Docker is a Powershell module that you can point at a virtual hard disk image, scan for common Windows components and suggest a Dockerfile. And to make it even easier, we’re hosting it in the Powershell Gallery to make it easy to install and use.
In Powershell, just type:
Install-Module -Name Image2Docker
And you’ll have access to Get-WindowsArtifacts and ConvertTo-Dockerfile. You can even select which discovery artifacts to search for.
Currently Image2Docker supports VHD, VHDK, and WIM images. If you have a VMDK, Microsoft provides a great conversion tool to convert VMDK images to VHD images.
And as an open source project, lead by a Docker Captain, it’s easy Continue reading
Ansible in GitHub’s Octoverse 2016
Recently GitHub released their State of the Octoverse 2016 which shows some really nice statistics and graphs of top projects, languages and organizations working on open source.
GitHub, in the spirit of full transparency, shared the methodology and queries used to generate the report. We used this dataset to understand where Ansible stacks up. One of the drawbacks in the approach where you are just considering single repositories is that you don’t get a good idea of where a single project broken out into multiple repositories would fall. In Ansible’s case, the project is broken down into three repositories:
Let's look at GitHub’s first graphic, Repositories with the most open source contributors. When you just consider Ansible’s Core Project repo we’re just barely out of the top 10 at 11th place.1
What does that number look like if we combine all three repositories that make up the Ansible project?2 
As far as projects go that would have us in 5th just behind Patchwork.
One of the facets that was most strange to me was the inclusion of Comments Continue reading
Why I’m Now Using VirtualBox with Vagrant
One of the things I often tell people is, “Use the right tool for the job.” As technologists, we shouldn’t get so locked onto any one technology or product that we can’t see when other technologies or products might solve a particular problem more effectively. It’s for this reason that I recently made VirtualBox—not VMware Fusion—my primary virtualization provider for Vagrant environments.
I know it seems odd for a VMware employee to use/prefer a non-VMware product over a competing VMware product. I’ve been a long-time Fusion user (since 2006 when I was part of the original “friends and family” early release). Since I started working with Vagrant about two years ago, I really tried to stick it out with VMware Fusion as my primary virtualization provider. I had a ton of experience with Fusion, and—honestly—it seemed like the right thing to do. After a couple of years, though, I’ve decided to switch to using VirtualBox as my primary provider for Vagrant.
Why? There’s a few different reasons:
-
Greater manageability: VirtualBox comes with a really powerful CLI tool,
vboxmanage, that lets me do just about anything from the command line. In fact, the VirtualBox documentation refers to Continue reading
Build and run your first Docker Windows Server container
Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2016, and with it, Docker engine running containers natively on Windows. This blog post describes how to get setup to run Docker Windows Containers on Windows 10 or using a Windows Server 2016 VM. Check out the companion blog posts on the technical improvements that have made Docker containers on Windows possible and the post announcing the Docker Inc. and Microsoft partnership.
Before getting started, It’s important to understand that Windows Containers run Windows executables compiled for the Windows Server kernel and userland (either windowsservercore or nanoserver). To build and run Windows containers, you have to have a Windows system with container support.
Windows 10 with Anniversary Update
For developers, Windows 10 is a great place to run Docker Windows containers and containerization support was added to the the Windows 10 kernel with the Anniversary Update (note that container images can only be based on Windows Server Core and Nanoserver, not Windows 10). All that’s missing is the Windows-native Docker Engine and some image base layers.
The simplest way to get a Windows Docker Engine is by installing the Docker for Windows public beta (direct download link). Docker for Continue reading
Real-time Insights Into App Delivery with Ansible Tower Data in Splunk
Here at Ansible by Red Hat, we’re always looking for ways to make Ansible more useful when automating all the things.
That being said, most people know this UI when they see it:
When we ask Ansible users about their favorite tools, Splunk is a very common answer. Splunk software is at its most powerful when it is used to aggregate and correlate data from numerous sources across your environment. However, there hasn't been an easy way to use Splunk to analyze data from Ansible Tower job runs.
Not any longer. Today we’re happy to announce the result of our latest integration project - the Ansible Tower App for Splunk.
The value of analytics platforms such as Splunk, is the ability to collect and correlate machine data including environment events with the actions that caused them. Application lifecycle management teams need the ability to correlate deployment-related data (i.e. Tower job runs) with host events (i.e. system and service logs).
Picture the following scenario:
A development team is working to release a new version of their application. What is the easiest way for a team to validate the success of the application deployment process?
The Ansible Tower app for Splunk allows a team to deploy Continue reading
Docker Announces Commercial Partnership with Microsoft to Double Container Market by Extending Docker Engine to Windows Server
With industry analysts declaring Windows Server with more than 60% of the x86 server market, and citing Microsoft Azure as the fastest-growing public cloud, it comes as no surprise that Microsoft, even at its current scale, is further extending its leadership as a strategic, trusted partner to enterprise IT.
It is this industry leadership that catalyzed our technical collaboration in the Docker open source project back in October 2014, to jointly bring the agility, portability, and security benefits of the Docker platform to Windows Server. After two years of joint engineering, we are excited to unveil a new, commercial partnership to extend these benefits for both Windows developers targeting Windows Server and enterprise IT professionals.
Specifically, the commercial partnership entails:
- The Commercially Supported Docker Engine aka “CS Docker Engine”, Docker, Inc.’s tested, validated, and supported package of Docker Engine, will be available to Windows Server 2016 customers at no additional cost
- Microsoft will provide Windows Server 2016 customers enterprise support for CS Docker Engine, backed by Docker, Inc
- Docker and Microsoft will jointly promote Docker Datacenter to enable IT Pros to secure the Windows Server software supply chain and manage containerized Windows Server workloads, whether on-prem, in the Continue reading
Introducing Docker for Windows Server 2016
Today, Microsoft is announcing general availability of Windows Server 2016 at the Ignite conference in Atlanta. For Windows developers and IT-pros, the most exciting new Windows feature is containers, and containers on Windows Server 2016 are powered by Docker.
The first version of Docker was released in 2013, and in the 3 years since launch, Docker has completely transformed how Linux developers and ops build, ship and run apps. With Docker Engine and containers now available natively on Windows, developers and IT-pros can begin the same transformation for Windows-based apps and infrastructure and start reaping the same benefits: better security, more agility, and improved portability and freedom to move on-prem apps to the cloud.
For developers and IT-pros that build and maintain heterogenous deployments with both Linux and Windows infrastructure, Docker on Windows holds even greater significance: The Docker platform now represents a single set of tools, APIs and image formats for managing both Linux and Windows apps. As Linux and Windows apps and servers are dockerized, developers and IT-pros can bridge the operating system divide with shared Docker terminology and interfaces for managing and evolving complex microservices deployments both on-prem and in the cloud.
Running Containers on Windows Server
Docker Weekly Roundup | September 18, 2016
It’s time for your weekly roundup! Get caught up on the top Docker news including; how to maintain dev environments for Java web apps, scale with Swarm, and make your CI/CD pipeline work for you. As we begin a new week, let’s recap our top five most-read stories of the week of September 18, 2016:
- Debugging Java in Docker tutorial for building a Java web application using containers and three popular Java IDEs: Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA and Netbeans by Sophia Parafina.
- Orchestration Workshop instructional workshop to scale out an app, operate and go deeper in Docker Swarm by Jerome Petazzoni.
- PiZero Swarm with OTG detailed explanation on how to build your own PiZero Swarm with OTG networking by Docker Captain Alex Ellis.
- Docker-based Workflow Learn how to make your CI/CD pipeline work with these four tips for an effective Docker-based workflow by Docker Captain Adrian Mouat.
- Service Discovery in the Swarm Cluster overview of how Docker Engine now acts as a Swarm manager, Swarm worker, and service registry by Docker Captain Viktor Farcic.
Weekly #Roundup: Top 5 #Docker stories for the week 09/18/16
Click To Tweet
The post Docker Weekly Roundup | September 18, 2016 appeared first Continue reading
Walk, Jog, Run: Getting Smarter About Docker
I’ve spent most of the summer traveling to and speaking at a lot of different trade shows: EMC World, Cisco Live!, VMworld, HP Discover, Dockercon, and LinuxCon (as well as some meetups and smaller gatherings). A lot of the time, I’m speaking to people who are just getting familiar with Docker. They may have read an article or have had someone walk into their office and say “This Docker thing, so hot right now. Go figure it out”.
Certainly there are a number of companies running Docker in production, but there are still many who are asking fundamental questions about what Docker is, and how it can benefit their organization. To help folks out in that regard, I wrote an eBook.
After someone gets a grasp on what Docker is, they tend to want to dive in and start exploring, but often times they aren’t sure how to get started.
My advice (based on the approach I took when I joined Docker last year) is to walk, jog, and then run:
Walk: Decide where you want to run Docker, and install it. This could be Docker for Mac, Docker for Windows, or just installing Docker on Linux. Continue reading
Announcing the new Docs Repo on GitHub!
By John Mulhausen
The documentation team at Docker is excited to announce that we are consolidating all of our documentation into a single GitHub Pages-based repository on GitHub.
When is this happening?
- The new repo is public now at https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io.
- During the week of Monday, September 26th, any existing docs PRs need to be migrated over or merged.
- We’ll do one last “pull” from the various docs repos on Wednesday, September 28th, at which time the docs/ folders in the various repos will be emptied.
- Between the 28th and full cutover, the docs team will be testing the new repo and making sure all is well across every page.
- Full cutover (production is drawing from the new repo, new docs work is pointed at the new repo, dissolution of old docs/ folders) is complete on Monday, October 3rd.
The problem with the status quo
- Up to now, the docs have been all inside the various project repos, inside folders named “docs/” — and to see the docs running on your local machine was a pain.
- The docs were built around Hugo, which is not natively supported by GitHub, and took minutes to build, and even longer for us Continue reading
Installing a Specific Version of Docker Engine
In this post, I’m going to show you how to install a specific version of the Docker Engine package on Ubuntu. While working on a side project (one that will hopefully bear fruit soon), I found myself in need of installing a slightly older version of Docker Engine (1.11 instead of 1.12, to be specific). While this task isn’t hard, it also wasn’t clearly spelled out anywhere, and this post aims to help address that shortcoming.
If you’ve followed the instructions to add the Docker Apt repos to your system as outlined here, then installing the Docker Engine (latest version) would be done something like this:
apt-get install docker-engine
If you do an apt-cache search docker-engine, though, you’ll find that the “docker-engine” package is a metapackage that refers to a variety of different versions of the Docker Engine. To install a specific version of the Docker Engine, then, simply append the version (as described by the results of the apt-cache search docker-engine command) to the end, like this:
apt-get install docker-engine=1.11.2-0~trusty
This will install version 1.11.2 of the Docker Engine.
You’ll use the same syntax when you need to install a specific Continue reading
5 Minutes with the Docker Captains
Docker Captain is a distinction that Docker awards select members of the community that are both experts in their field and are passionate about sharing their Docker knowledge with others.
This week we are highlighting 3 of our outstanding Captains who are making September one filled with Docker learnings and events. Read on to learn more about how they got started, what they love most about Docker, and why Docker.
Alex is a Principal Application Developer with expertise in the full Microsoft .NET stack, Node.js and Ruby. He enjoys making robots and IoT-connected projects with Linux and the Raspberry PI microcomputer. He is a writer for Linux User and Developer magazine and also produces tutorials on Docker, coding and IoT for his tech blog at alexellis.io.
As a Docker Captain, how do you share that learning with the community?
I started out by sharing tutorials and code on my blog alexellis.io and on Github. More recently I’ve attended local meet-up groups, conferences and tech events to speak and tell a story about Docker and cool hacks. I joined Twitter in March and it’s definitely a must-have for reaching people.
Why do you like Docker?
Docker Continue reading