Docker 1.12 adds the largest and most complex set of features into a single release since the beginning of the Docker project. Dozens of engineers, both Docker employees and external contributors, have made substantial contributions to every aspect of 1.12 orchestration: core algorithms, integration into the Docker Engine, documentation and testing.

 

1. Swarm Mode Simplifies Distributed Application Definition, Deployment and Reliability
   With the latest updates to Docker Engine, developers can build more complex applications with multiple services, container-defined networking and powerful security. Docker 1.12 dramatically simplifies the process of creating groups of Docker Engines, also known as Swarms. A Swarm is a decentralized and highly available group of Docker nodes. Each node is a self-contained orchestration subsystem that has all the inherent capabilities needed to create a pool of common resources to schedule Dockerized services. The self-organizing, self-healing capabilities of Swarms are now backed by automated service discovery and a built-in distributed datastore. As a result, it takes just one command to add a Docker Engine and horizontally scale a Swarm.

• Swarm mode is available in every Engine to automatically discover each other and self-organize into decentralized Swarm

o    Swarm mode is an option to be switched on; batteries included but swappable

• Built-in, strongly consistent distributed store
• Self-healing Swarm handles node failures to restore desired application state
• Dynamic role promotion and demotion of Engines in the Swarm
• Zero-downtime node management, including maintenance mode and advanced diagnostics
• Robust architecture infrastructure with zero-SPOF (single point of failure) architecture

 

2. Service deployment API to run and scale services : The new service deployment API describes all the resources and components with a single command that allows operations teams to run and scale a service. Through the API, the Swarm is aware of the application defined and will continuously check and reconcile the environment against the requirements of the application when something adverse happens. Unlike other systems, the Swarm itself has no single point of failure. The state of all services is replicated in real time across a group of managers so containers can be rescheduled after any node failure.

• Declarative services API with desired state reconciliation of applications as an abstraction above containers. Declare services, image, scale and ports
• Rolling updates to enable blue/green, canary and other deploy models
• Application-specified health checks

 

3. Powerful Routing mesh – Docker orchestration includes a unique in-memory caching layer that maintains state of the entire Swarm, providing a non-blocking architecture which assures scheduling performance even during peak times. Additionally, the system has a built-in routing mesh technology that addresses the challenge of how to provide container-aware load balancing. The routing mesh ensures that requests are made to the right containers regardless of where they have been scheduled within the Swarm.

• Out of the box multi-host overlay networking
• Automatic service discovery by DNS available out of the box
• Built in container-aware load balancing, through which load balancing and global port definition by service dynamically reroutes traffic to the right container

 

4. Secure by default: Each Engine is automatically assigned a cryptographic identity which ensures that only validated Engines can be accepted into a Swarm. Moreover, Docker Engine comes with mutually authenticated TLS, providing authentication, authorization and end-to-end encrypted communications among every node participating in the Swarm, without the operator having to take any steps to enable it. Specific capabilities include:

• Out of the box TLS configuration ensures all nodes in a Swarm communicate with each other using mutual TLS.
• Cryptographic Node Identity is general purpose framework that allows for trusted workload dispatch. It enables cryptographically secure decisions about which nodes can runs sensitive workloads, or access sensitive networks.
• Seamless PKI with automatic certificate rotation
• Configurable acceptance policies to configure how nodes can join a Swarm: automatic, manual or require a secret.

There are three really important themes in this release:

 

Fault-tolerant application deployment platform
Modern applications are increasingly designed in a microservices architectural pattern where the process of serving back data to a user may need to invoke several different services. Real world machines fail all the time and these microservices need to continue to be available even in the face of such random failures. Docker 1.12 gives you this power by providing a zero-SPOF design leveraging a quorum of managers, plus a service abstraction that spawns multiple replicas and quickly reschedules them if their host disappears.

 

Scale and performance
Docker 1.12’s Swarm mode orchestration was designed from the ground up with scale and performance in mind. The internal Raft distributed datastore has been optimized for lightning fast reads from a memory cache, and the cluster management design minimizes writes that would invalidate this cache.

 

Secure networking
In many systems, security is something you have to “turn on” by generating TLS certificates, running the system on a different port, and figuring out traffic flows to make sure no packets traverse an insecure network unencrypted. With Docker 1.12, all of these things are done for you out of the box. The system is “secure by default,” which means that you don’t need to be a security expert to get a secure application management platform.

 

Related Links:

• Docker 1.12 Blog – Deep Dive into 1.12 Architecture
• Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode Deep Dive Part 1: Topology
• Docker 1.12 Swarm Mode Deep Dive Part 2: Orchestration

 

Docker For Mac/Docker for Windows in Production

Docker for Mac/Docker for Windows is an integrated, easy-to-deploy environment for building, assembling, and shipping applications from Mac or Windows. Docker for Mac and Windows contain many improvements over Docker Toolbox. It is fast and more reliable – no more VirtualBox! The Docker engine is running in an Alpine Linux distribution on top of an xhyve Virtual Machine on Mac OS X or on a Hyper-V VM on Windows, and that VM is managed by the Docker application. You don’t need docker-machine to run Docker for Mac and Windows.

There is also tool integration as Docker for Mac is a Mac application and Docker for Windows is a Windows application, including a native user interface and auto-update capability. The Docker tool set comes bundled with it: Docker command line, Docker Compose, and Docker Notary command line.

Since its introduction early this year, tens of thousands of users have tested the solution and provided feedback for further enhancements. Docker for Mac/Docker For Windows offers:

• A faster and more reliable experience – native development environment using hypervisors built into each operating system. (No more VirtualBox!)
• Improved Docker tools integration – all the Docker tools you need to develop locally are bundled in the app.
• Improved development flow – Volume mounting for your code and data, and easy access to running containers on the localhost network. In-container debugging with supported IDEs also help you live debug projects, and iterate code quicker with less effort.
• Enterprise network support that lets Docker for Mac and Windows work easily with VPNs.
• All the new features available in Docker Engine 1.12.
• Automatic updates, with different channels for stable and beta.

With Docker for Mac and Windows maturing and widely adopted, we want make sure that it’s a reliable and dependable tool. But we also want to keep up the rapid pace of innovation and progress that Docker for Mac and Windows beta users have come to know and love over the past months.

Docker for Mac and Windows are available from two channels – stable and beta. New features and bug fixes will go out first in auto-updates to users in the beta channel. Updates to the stable channel are much less frequent and happen in sync with major and minor releases of the Docker engine. Only features that are well-tested and ready for production are added to the stable channel releases.

Related Links:

Docker for Mac/Windows GA Blog

San Francisco – Aug. 1, 2016 – AppDynamics, an application intelligence leader powering enterprise digital transformation, today announced its Summer ‘16 release, which includes the new Microservices iQ, the industry’s first solution built for the enterprise to accelerate digital transformation powered by microservices. Microservices iQ, a new Performance Engine in the App iQ Platform, will help enable enterprises to deliver application performances that exceed the scale, sophistication and velocity expectations of today’s customers.

Uber and Amazon have established the new standard for customer experiences—global, mobile and at internet scale. Many enterprises envy their speed and scale and are attempting to emulate their disruptive innovation by investing aggressively in technology. As proven out by these industry leaders, one of the fastest paths to continuous and scalable innovation are microservices—one of the most promising trends in enterprise IT architectures. Companies like GE and Walmart are moving to microservices from m onolithic applications for their agility and the fact that they can reduce application development lead times by nearly 75 percent. In fact, approximately 70 percent of organizations are using or investigating microservices, according to a recent report.

With the AppDynamics Summer ‘16 release, AppDynamics will deliver Microservices iQ with capabilities for the monitoring, management and optimization of microservices architectures. Enterprises are breaking up their large, rigid, monolithic applications into smaller, more manageable pieces with microservices. Microservices require many more application server instances to run the smaller pieces, creating a significantly larger footprint of application instances.

Until Microservices iQ, companies didn’t have the means to monitor, manage or bolster their performance in enterprise production environments. Now, they can accelerate their microservices deployments and gain control of their performance with Microservices iQ capabilities, including:

• Service Endpoints—Microservices iQ automatically detects the service endpoints of a microservices architecture, enabling companies to shine a spotlight on a particular microservice without worrying about potentially multiple business transactions that use it. DevOps teams can then monitor that microservice’s key performance indicators (KPIs) like calls per minute, average response time, and errors per minute from early in the development lifecycle through production. Snapshots with detailed diagnostics enable DevOps teams to drill down and isolate the root cause of any performance issues affecting any microservices. Microservices are developed in isolation, and then used by one or more business transactions. Now DevOps teams can focus on their areas of responsibility, making them more efficient, while AppDynamics helps ensure the broader business is performing.
• Elasticity Management—In highly dynamic environments, with microservices deployed in containers or the cloud, underlying infrastructure nodes can scale up and down rapidly, creating a significant operational challenge to track their performanc
  e. Microservices iQ uses a logical identity system to solve this and maintains historical data under these identities, making it easy and efficient to keep track of them continuously. Companies can now focus on the health of their microservices overall, without being distracted by fluctuations of hosts or containers starting and stopping.
• Contention Analysis—Microservices often must scale to support thousands of simultaneous requests, which raises the likelihood of bottlenecks as requests try to access the same data. When used within the scope of service endpoints the new thread contention analyzer helps identify methods where threads are blocked–identifying block time, blocking object and the blocking line of code. Thus significantly minimizing the time required to isolate and resolve application performance issues with microservices and the business transactions invoking them. Now companies can scale their microservices with confidence that the potentially thousands of simultaneous requests will succeed.

Microservices iQ extends AppDynamics’ existing App iQ Platform that enables enterprises to deliver performance that exceeds the scale, sophistication and velocity expectations of today’s customers. The platform is the foundation to AppDynamics’ customers’ success and powered by intelligent Performance Engines. These intelligent performance engines work in concert to help ensure enterprises can deliver peak performance across any application, user engagement and business transaction.

Comments on the News

• “When it comes to risk management, our application is more than business critical—our customers rely on our application to ensure their employees’ safety,” said Nuno Pereira, CTO, iJET International. “By using microservices, we have the ability to scale our application based on desired business outcomes and can make updates more effectively. With AppDynamics, we gain better visibility into how microservices interface with the rest of the components of our application, the ability to proactively troubleshoot emerging issues, and the increased velocity to resolve issues faster than ever.”
• “Every company wants to become the disruptor in their industry, but doesn’t have the means to overcome the complexities presented by digital transformation,” said Donnie Berkholz, research director of Development, DevOps and IT Op, 451 Research. “Microservices are the future of how enterprises swiftly make the change and AppDynamics has the smart approach to managing performance during the transition with its platform.”

AppDynamics empowers enterprises, including DIRECTV, eHarmony, Kraft, MTV Networks, NASDAQ, Pearson, Progressive Insurance and Sephora to deliver performances that exceed the expectations of today’s customers. With a single view of their application portfolios, the ability to drill into any particular line of the potentially billions of lines of code flowing through their environments, enterprises can then deliver peak performance during their digital transformation. AppDynamics’ industry leading unified monitoring suite of applications, including Application Performance Management, End-User Monitoring, Infrastructure Visibility and Application Analytics enables companies to optimize every endpoint, node and microservice on the journey.

 

 

 

Pricing and Availability

• AppDynamics Summer ’16 is expected to be generally available in August 2016
• Microservices iQ Performance Engine will be included in licenses of AppDynamics’ Application Performance Management solution for no additional cost

Additional Information

• Learn more about Microservices iQ Performance Engine at http://blog.appdynamics.com/news/introducing-microservices-iq/`
• Learn more about App iQ Platform at www.appdynamics.com/product/app-iq-platform

Connect with AppDynamics

• Follow @AppDynamics on Twitter
• Like AppDynamics on Facebook

About AppDynamics

AppDynamics is the Application Intelligence Company. With AppDynamics, enterprises have real-time insights into application performance, user performance and business performance so they can move faster in an increasingly sophisticated, software-driven world. Our leading application suite is built on the App iQ Platform, the industry’s most intelligent approach to managing performance. AppDynamics is the leader for its proven success and trust with the Global 2000, helping them as they transform into digital enterprises. For more information, visit appdynamics.com.