Docker EE Deep Dive

This is a liveblog of the session titled “Docker EE Deep Dive,” part of the Docker Best Practices track here at DockerCon EU 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The speaker is Patrick Devine, a Product Manager at Docker. I had also toyed with the idea of attending the Cilium presentation in the Black Belt track, but given that I attended a version of that talk in Austin in April (liveblog is here), I figured I’d better stretch my boundaries and dig deeper into Docker EE.

Devine starts with a bit of information on his background, then provides an overview of the two editions (Community and Enterprise) of Docker. (Recall again that Docker is the downstream product resulting from the open source Moby upstream project.) Focusing a bit more on Docker EE, Devine outlines some of the features of Docker EE: integrated orchestration, stable releases for 1 year with support and maintenance, security patches and hotfixes backported to all supported versions, and enterprise-class support.

So what components are found in Docker EE? It starts with the Docker Engine, which has the core container runtime, orchestration, networking, volumes, plugins, etc. On top of that is Univeral Control Plane (UCP), which Continue reading

DockerCon EU 2017 Day 2 Keynote

This is a liveblog of the day 2 keynote/general session here in Copenhagen, Denmark, at DockerCon EU 2017. Yesterday’s keynote (see the liveblog here) featured the hotly-anticipated Kubernetes announcement (I shared some thoughts here), so it will be interesting to see what Docker has in store for today’s general session.

At 9:02am, the lights go down and Scott Johnston, COO of Docker (@scottcjohnnston on Twitter), takes the stage. Johnston provides a brief recap of yesterday’s activities, from the keynote to the breakout sessions to the party last night, then dives into content focusing around modernizing traditional applications through partnerships. (If two themes have emerged from this year’s DockerCon EU, they are “Docker is a platform” and “Modernize traditional applications”.) Johnston shares statistics that show 50% of customers have leveraging hybrid cloud as a priority, and that increasing major release frequency is also a priority for enterprise IT organizations. According to Johnston, 79% of customers are saying that increasing software release velocity is a goal for their organizations. Continuing with the statistics, Johnston shows a very familiar set of numbers stating that 80% of the IT spend is on maintenance (I say familiar because these numbers Continue reading

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth: IoT, Ubuntu and the yogurt of the future

Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth is one of the most prominent people in open source software.Ubuntu, the GNU/Linux-based operating system that he helped birth in 2004 is now one of the best-known open source projects in the world, accounting for a vast proportion of the Linux VMs in the public cloud and huge numbers of connected devices.He sat down with Network World Senior Writer Jon Gold to talk about the future of IoT and the evolution of technology.NW: One thing that’s interesting about IoT is that new tech is coming from companies that you wouldn’t consider traditional IT vendors.MS: The thing I personally love about IoT is that it’s genuine entrepreneurship – but the thing about IoT is that literally anybody that finds themselves in a particular situation is able to see how taking a small piece of electronics and some software in a particular context to make something better. So that makes it just a lot of fun from an entrepreneurial point of view.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Some Thoughts on the Docker-Kubernetes Announcement

Today at DockerCon EU, Docker announced that the next version of Docker (and its upstream open source project, the Moby Project) will feature integration with Kubernetes (see my liveblog of the day 1 general session). Customers will be able to choose whether they leverage Swarm or Kubernetes for container orchestration. In this post, I’ll share a few thoughts on this move by Docker.

First off, you may find it useful to review some details of the announcement via Docker’s blog post.

Done reviewing the announcement? Here are some thoughts; some of them are mine, some of them are from others around the Internet.

  • It probably goes without saying that this announcement was largely anticipated (see this TechCrunch article, for example). So while the details of how Docker would go about adding Kubernetes support was not clear, many people expected some form of announcement around Kubernetes at the conference. I’m not sure that folks expected this level of integration, or that the integration would take this particular shape/form.
  • In looking back on the announcement and the demos from today’s general session and in thinking about the forces that drove Docker to provide Kubernetes integration, it occurs to me that Continue reading

Cheap Stuff is not Cheap

I have often fallen for the temptation of buying cheap instead of buying quality. This might be a saw, a drill, a lawnmower or just about anything imaginable. When I look at what professionals use I see them buying well-known and commercial grade products. For example, I wouldn’t expect to see my lawn care team buying a consumer lawnmower at Evil Big Box Store. They actually buy expensive commercial grade zero turn models that are roughly eight to ten times the cost of any mower I would consider.

My lawn care professionals mow lawns to make money, so what gives? Some might assume that these commercial grade products simply allow them to do their jobs faster. In nearly all cases, that is only half of the story. These products last much longer and hold up under the extremes of daily use. Their decks are heavy duty and the blades are less susceptible to being bent. The bottom line that these units mow faster AND they last longer. They spend less time in the shop and do the job they were purchased to do.

I find these quality issues with many consumer grade products. They’re basically cheap and disposable. The end result is Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 6 AI ingredients every wireless networking strategy needs

Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. There’s broad consensus that AI is the next game-changing technology, poised to impact virtually every aspect of our lives in the coming years, from transportation to medical care to financial services. Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will be pervasive in almost every new software product and service and the technology will be a top five investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs.An area where AI is already showing enormous value is wireless networking. The use of machine learning can transform WLANs into neural networks that simplify operations, expedite troubleshooting and provide unprecedented visibility into the user experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 6 AI ingredients every wireless networking strategy needs

Artificial intelligence is all the rage these days. There’s broad consensus that AI is the next game-changing technology, poised to impact virtually every aspect of our lives in the coming years, from transportation to medical care to financial services. Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will be pervasive in almost every new software product and service and the technology will be a top five investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs.An area where AI is already showing enormous value is wireless networking. The use of machine learning can transform WLANs into neural networks that simplify operations, expedite troubleshooting and provide unprecedented visibility into the user experience.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it’s still not enough

Hard disk makers are using capacity as their chief bulwark against the rise of solid-state drives (SSDs), since they certainly can’t argue on performance, and Western Digital — the king of the hard drive vendors — has shown off a new technology that could lead to 40TB drives.Western Digital already has the largest-capacity drive on the market. It recently introduced a 14TB drive, filled with helium to reduce drag on the spinning platters. But thanks to a new technology called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), the company hopes to reach 40TB by 2025. The company promised engineering samples of drive by mid-2018.Also on Network World: Get ready for new storage technologies and media MAMR technology is a new method of cramming more data onto the disk. Western Digital’s chief rival, Seagate, is working on a competitive product called HAMR, or heat-assisted magnetic recording. I’ll leave it to propeller heads like AnandTech to explain the electrical engineering of it all. What matters to the end user is that it should ship sometime in 2019, and that’s after 13 years of research and development. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Western Digital plans 40TB drives, but it’s still not enough

Hard disk makers are using capacity as their chief bulwark against the rise of solid-state drives (SSDs), since they certainly can’t argue on performance, and Western Digital — the king of the hard drive vendors — has shown off a new technology that could lead to 40TB drives.Western Digital already has the largest-capacity drive on the market. It recently introduced a 14TB drive, filled with helium to reduce drag on the spinning platters. But thanks to a new technology called microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), the company hopes to reach 40TB by 2025. The company promised engineering samples of drive by mid-2018.Also on Network World: Get ready for new storage technologies and media MAMR technology is a new method of cramming more data onto the disk. Western Digital’s chief rival, Seagate, is working on a competitive product called HAMR, or heat-assisted magnetic recording. I’ll leave it to propeller heads like AnandTech to explain the electrical engineering of it all. What matters to the end user is that it should ship sometime in 2019, and that’s after 13 years of research and development. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Arista EOS CloudVision

Arista EOS® CloudVision® provides a centralized point of visibility, configuration and control for Arista devices. The CloudVision controller is available as a virtual machine or physical appliance.


Fabric Visibility on Arista EOS Central describes how to use industry standard sFlow instrumentation in Arista switches to deliver real-time flow analytics. This article describes the steps needed to integrate flow analytics into CloudVision.

Log into the CloudVision node and run the following cvp_install_fabricview.sh script as root:
#!/bin/sh
# Install Fabric View on CloudVision Portal (CVP)

VER=`wget -qO - http://inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/latest.txt`
wget http://www.inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/sflow-rt-$VER.noarch.rpm
rpm --nodeps -ivh sflow-rt-$VER.noarch.rpm
/usr/local/sflow-rt/get-app.sh sflow-rt fabric-view

ln -s /cvpi/jdk/bin/java /usr/bin/java

sed -i '/^# http.hostname=/s/^# //' /usr/local/sflow-rt/conf.d/sflow-rt.conf
echo "http.html.redirect=./app/fabric-view/html/" >> /usr/local/sflow-rt/conf.d/sflow-rt.conf

cat <<EOT > /etc/nginx/conf.d/locations/sflow-rt.https.conf
location /sflow-rt/ {
  auth_request /aeris/auth;
  proxy_buffering off;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For \$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Prefix /sflow-rt/;
  proxy_set_header Host \$host;
  proxy_pass http://localhost:8008/;
  proxy_redirect ~^http://[^/]+(/.+)\$ /sflow-rt\$1;
}
EOT

systemctl restart nginx.service

firewall-cmd --zone public --add-port=6343/udp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

systemctl enable sflow-rt.service
systemctl start sflow-rt.service

wget http://www.inmon.com/products/sFlow-RT/cvp-eapi-topology.py
chmod +x cvp-eapi-topology.py

echo "configure and run cvp-eapi-topology.py"
Edit the cvp-api-topology.py script to Continue reading

Real world use cases for NSX and Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) is the leading PaaS solution for enterprise customers today, providing a fast way to convert their ideas from conception to production. This is achieved by providing a platform to run their code in any cloud and any language taking care of all the infrastructure “stuff” for them.

From building the container image, compiling it with the required runtime , deploying it in a highly available mode and connecting it to the required services, PCF allows dev shops to concentrate on developing their code.

While the platform is providing developers with the most simplified experience conceivable, under the hood there are many moving parts that make that happen and plumbing all these parts can be complex. That’s where customers are really enjoying the power of VMware’s SDDC, and the glue between the PaaS and SDDC layers is NSX, it is the enabler that makes it all work.

In this blog post I detail some of the main uses cases customers have already deployed NSX for PCF on top of vSphere and how PCF and NSX are much better together in the real world.

The use cases customers are deploying with NSX for PCF are varied and ill Continue reading

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