"docker" entries

Four short links: 21 July 2015

Four short links: 21 July 2015

Web Future, GCE vs Amazon, Scammy eBooks, and Container Clusters

  1. Web Design: The First 100 Years (Maciej Ceglowski) — There’s a William Gibson quote that Tim O’Reilly likes to repeat: “the future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” O’Reilly takes this to mean that if we surround ourselves with the right people, it can give us a sneak peek at coming attractions. I like to interpret this quote differently, as a call to action. Rather than waiting passively for technology to change the world, let’s see how much we can do with what we already have. Let’s reclaim the Web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.
  2. Comparing Cassandra Write Performance on Google Compute Engine and AWStl;dr – We achieved better Cassandra performance on GCE vs. Amazon, at close to half the cost. Also interesting for how they built the benchmark.
  3. The Scammy Underground World of Kindle eBooksThe biggest issue here isn’t that scammers are raking in cash from low-quality content; it’s that Amazon is allowing this to happen. Publisher brand value is the reliable expectation that buyers have of the book quality. Amazon’s publishing arm is spending the good brand value built by its distribution arm.
  4. Empire a 12-factor-compatible, Docker-based container cluster built on top of Amazon’s robust EC2 Container Service (ECS), complete with a full-featured command line interface. Open source.

Set up Kubernetes with a Docker compose one-liner

Start exploring Kubernetes with minimal effort.

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I had not looked at Kubernetes in over a month. It is a fast paced project so it is hard to keep up. If you have not looked at Kubernetes, it is roughly a cluster manager for containers. It takes a set of Docker hosts under management and schedules groups of containers in them. Kubernetes was open sourced by Google around June last year to bring all the Google knowledge of working with containers to us, a.k.a The people :) There are a lot of container schedulers or orchestrators if you wish out there, Citadel, Docker Swarm, Mesos with the Marathon framework, Cloud Foundry lattice etc. The Docker ecosystem is booming and our heads are spinning.

What I find very interesting with Kubernetes is the concept of replication controllers. Not only can you schedule groups of colocated containers together in a cluster, but you can also define replica sets. Say you have a container you want to scale up or down, you can define a replica controller and use it to resize the number of containers running. It is great for scaling when the load dictates it, but it is also great when you want to replace a container with a new image. Kubernetes also exposes a concept of services basically a way to expose a container application to all the hosts in your cluster as if it were running locally. Think the ambassador pattern of the early Docker days but on steroids.

Read more…

Applied DevOps and the potential of Docker

The cultural impact within a software engineering organization can be dramatic.

Editor’s note: this post is from Karl Matthias and Sean P. Kane, authors of “Docker Up & Running,” a guide to quickly learn how to use Docker to create packaged images for easy management, testing, and deployment of software.

At the Python Developers Conference in Santa Clara, California, on March 15th, 2013, with no pre-announcement and little fanfare, Solomon Hykes, the founder and CEO of dotCloud, gave a 5-minute lightning talk where he first introduced the world to a brand new tool for Linux called Docker. It was a response to the hardships of shipping software at scale in a fast-paced world, and takes an approach that makes it easy to map organizational processes to the principles of DevOps.

The capabilities of the typical software engineering company have often not kept pace with the quickly evolving expectations of the average technology user. Users today expect fast, reliable systems with continuous improvements, ease of use, and broad integrations. Many in the industry see the principles of DevOps as a giant leap toward building organizations that meet the challenges of delivering high quality software in today’s market. Docker is aimed at these challenges.

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Four short links: 7 May 2015

Four short links: 7 May 2015

Predicting Hits, Pricing Strategies, Quis Calculiet Shifty Custodes, Docker Security

  1. Predicting a Billboard Music Hit (YouTube) — Shazam VP of Music and Platforms at Strata London. With relative accuracy, we can predict 33 days out what song will go to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in the U.S.
  2. Psychological Pricing Strategies — a handy wrap-up of evil^wuseful pricing strategies to know.
  3. What Two Programmers Have Revealed So Far About Seattle Police Officers Who Are Still in Uniformthrough their shrewd use of Washington’s Public Records Act, the two Seattle residents are now the closest thing the city has to a civilian police-oversight board. In the last year and a half, they have acquired hundreds of reports, videos, and 911 calls related to the Seattle Police Department’s internal investigations of officer misconduct between 2010 and 2013. And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive force—with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically “run interference” for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.
  4. Understanding Docker Security and Best Practices — explanation of container security and a benchmark for security practices, though email addresses will need to be surrendered in exchange for the good info.
Four short links: 9 April 2015

Four short links: 9 April 2015

Robot Personalities, Programmer Competency, Docker Dependencies, and Large Files in Git

  1. Google’s Patent on Virtual People Personalities — via IEEE Spectrum, who are not bullish, a method for downloadable personalities. Prior art? Don’t talk to me about prior art. The only thing more depressing than this patent is the tech commentary that fails to cite Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
  2. Programmer Competency Matrix — a rubric for developer development.
  3. Aviator — Clever’s open source service dependency management tool, described here.
  4. Announcing Git’s Large File Storagean improved way to integrate large binary files such as audio samples, data sets, graphics, and videos into your Git workflow..

How to create a Swarm cluster with Docker

Using Docker Machine to create a Swarm cluster across cloud providers.

Editor’s note: this is an Early Release excerpt from Chapter 7 of Docker Cookbook by Sébastien Goasguen. The recipes in this book will help developers go from zero knowledge to distributed applications packaged and deployed within a couple of chapters. One of the key value propositions of Docker is app portability. The following will show you how to use Docker Machine to create a Swarm cluster across cloud providers.

Problem

You understand how to create a Swarm cluster manually (see Recipe 7.3), but you would like to create one with nodes in multiple public Cloud Providers and keep the UX experience of the local Docker CLI.

Solution

Use Docker Machine to start Docker hosts in several Cloud providers and bootstrap them automatically to create a swarm cluster.

Read more…

The shape of software architecture

Five things we learned from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015.

Last week, I had the opportunity to see the first Software Architecture Conference spring to life after a winter of preparation. Software architects, with or without the official title, swarmed the halls learning from speakers and attendees alike. I count myself among the people who were learning. Many notions about this profession and skill set have become clearer to me and I’m already planning to keep the content coming. I’m also in the early stages of developing out the next Software Architecture Conference (spring 2016).

Within this piece you’ll find my takeaways and lessons learned from the event. I expect these initial impressions to both shape our upcoming exploration of software architecture and be shaped by continued shifts within software architecture.
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What is DevOps (yet again)?

Empathy, communication, and collaboration across organizational boundaries.

Cropped image "Kilobot robot swarm" by asuscreative - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kilobot_robot_swarm.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Kilobot_robot_swarm.JPG

I might try to define DevOps as the movement that doesn’t want to be defined. Or as the movement that wants to evade the inevitable cargo-culting that goes with most technical movements. Or the non-movement that’s resisting becoming a movement. I’ve written enough about “what is DevOps” that I should probably be given an honorary doctorate in DevOps Studies.

Baron Schwartz (among others) thinks it’s high time to have a definition, and that only a definition will save DevOps from an identity crisis. Without a definition, it’s subject to the whims of individual interest groups, and ultimately might become a movement that’s defined by nothing more than the desire to “not be like them.” Dave Zwieback (among others) says that the lack of a definition is more of a blessing than a curse, because it “continues to be an open conversation about making our organizations better.” Both have good points. Is it possible to frame DevOps in a way that preserves the openness of the conversation, while giving it some definition? I think so.

DevOps started as an attempt to think long and hard about the realities of running a modern web site, a problem that has only gotten more difficult over the years. How do we build and maintain critical sites that are increasingly complex, have stringent requirements for performance and uptime, and support thousands or millions of users? How do we avoid the “throw it over the wall” mentality, in which an operations team gets the fallout of the development teams’ bugs? How do we involve developers in maintenance without compromising their ability to release new software?

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What containers can do for you

Docker, Rocket, and big industry changes are making it a great time to seriously consider using containers.

Container Image: CC BY-SA 2.0 Photocapy https://www.flickr.com/photos/photocapy/252737232/in/photostream/

If you read any IT news these days it’s hard to miss a headline about “the container revolution.” Docker’s year-and-a-half-old engine had a monopoly on the buzz until CoreOS launched its own project, Rocket, in December.

The technology behind containers can seem esoteric, but the advantages of bringing containers to your organization are more compelling than ever. And containers’ inherent portability opens up exciting new opportunities for how organizations host their applications.

Containerization is having its moment and there’s never been a better time to check it out for yourself.

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Four short links: 15 January 2015

Four short links: 15 January 2015

Secure Docker Deployment, Devops Identity, Graph Processing, and Hadoop Alternative

  1. Docker Secure Deployment Guidelinesdeployment checklist for securely deploying Docker.
  2. The Devops Identity Crisis (Baron Schwartz) — I saw one framework-retailing bozo saying that devops was the art of ensuring there were no flaws in software. I didn’t know whether to cry or keep firing until the gun clicked.
  3. Apache Giraphan iterative graph processing system built for high scalability. For example, it is currently used at Facebook to analyze the social graph formed by users and their connections.
  4. Apache Flinka data processing system and an alternative to Hadoop’s MapReduce component. It comes with its own runtime, rather than building on top of MapReduce. As such, it can work completely independently of the Hadoop ecosystem. However, Flink can also access Hadoop’s distributed file system (HDFS) to read and write data, and Hadoop’s next-generation resource manager (YARN) to provision cluster resources. Since most Flink users are using Hadoop HDFS to store their data, we ship already the required libraries to access HDFS.