devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: docker

  • What’s hot with DevOps

    What’s hot with DevOps

    DevOps as a movement to transform people, technology, processes for higher business value is here to stay. It’s disrupting organizational processes replacing the old with the new. Command and control IT, a historical approach to regulating tech top-down, is trending toward decentralization thanks to DevOps.

    Software source control is another such case. We saw Git take on the source control bigwigs and redefine how we collaborate and build software. Now, which other areas is DevOps disrupting?

    What’s hot with DevOps?

    Application services

    We have a famous saying in my home country Spain, The King is dead, long live The King! I say, “The application is dead, long live the application.” I’m referring to the practice of implementing applications as monoliths. Monolithic applications are a dying concept. Why? Because it’s better to design them as a collection of services that link together. Such a flexible structure allows service reuse and control at a granular level. And you manage their lifecycles independently. Attempting to control these services centrally though is the equivalent of trying to balance the federal budget.

    It’s challenging to manage the lifecycle of services because of the very nature of agile business decision-making. Since services are much more granular, managing their lifecycle is also such. That’s why current application lifecycle management tools do not scale for service-oriented applications. Next generation application lifecycle management requires a focus on the service not on the application.

    Microservices and Docker

    Microservices is to infrastructure what service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to applications. Next generation applications require agile infrastructure to sustain the cadence of faster releases. Microservices align infrastructure management to the much more granular world of application services.

    Over the last year, microservices gained traction fueled by the container revolution. The unit of infrastructure shrank from a VM to a container allowing applications to run as a composition of smaller self-contained services making application releases that much more agile. So my second bet is on containerizing application services.

    Hybrid and multi-cloud

    Third, cloud infrastructure management tools must scale to the next generation of the container and service-ready applications. In the world where infrastructure is a service, application architecture can no longer rely on infrastructure implementing a particular way. A development or QA environment does not have the same SLA needs or constraints of a production environment as an example. So applications must be able to run across a diverse infrastructure.

    The first generation cloud management tools focused on managing servers in public clouds. That focus made every infrastructure provider a special case. Special cases don’t scale though. The cloud management tools must scale by removing dependencies between applications and infrastructure. Thereby, infrastructure becomes a choice, not a dependency. Application services must be able to run in private, public, hybrid, or multiple cloud environments. Such elasticity and independence are what applications demand from infrastructure.

    Having been in this space for more than a decade now, I live and experience these DevOps trends daily. What are your thoughts, are there any trends you’re following closely?

  • Container Usage Survey

    Container Usage Survey

    Is there any topic in IT hotter than containers today? Hard to make a case that there is. Whether it is Docker or Rocket, LHX or something else, it seems everyone is talking about them. But what are people actually doing with them? devopsy.kinsta.cloud and ClusterHQ are conducting a survey on actual and planned container usage. The results will be published just before DockerCon next month.

    We need your help though to make the survey as insightful as possible. The more responses we have the better. So we are offering a $50 dollar Amazon gift card to one out of every 50 people who take the survey. The survey is only about 20 questions and shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete.  We don’t ask for contact info unless you want to be eligible for the gift card giveaway.  Either way taking the survey is a big help to us, ClusterHQ and everyone else as well.

    The link to take the survey is:https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3TZ9LDC

    One of the key areas of inquiry is how many people are actually using containers in production environment. How many have already used containers versus how many are planning to do so? What about data management in containers? These areas and more are explored in the survey.  It should make for some excellent research.

    Thanks for your help in making this a great survey!

  • 31 Reference Architectures for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

    31 Reference Architectures for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

    At QCon London, David Farley (@davefarley77) told the audience that “continuous delivery changes the economics of software delivery”.  I could not agree more.

    If you have been drawn to the evangelists like David Farley, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim, you’ll know that high performance IT organizations are seeing a massive payoff in their continuous delivery investments.  Industry leaders big and small are sharing noticeable results:

    • 8x more frequent production deployments
    • 50% lower change failure rates
    • 12x faster service restoration times when something went wrong

    5 Principles

    How are they achieving these results?  They are following a few key principles that David and Jez outlined in their seminal book, Continuous Delivery (highly recommended).  The principles outlined in their book and in David’s QCon presentation are as follows:

    • Deliver fast
    • Automate almost everything
    • Keep everything in version control
    • Build quality In
    • Empower the team 

    Reference Architectures for DevOps and Continuous Delivery

    In their book, they also provide insight to continuous delivery tool chains and processes which highlight build tools, CI platforms, testing suites, artifact repositories, and many other components. There are numerous examples of reference architectures available, and each of them vary in levels of detail, tools highlighted, and processes followed.  Yet, there is a constant theme among the tool sets: Jenkins, Maven, Nexus, Subversion, Git, Docker, Puppet/Chef, Rundeck, and Sonar seem to show up time and again.

    To help you along your continuous delivery and DevOps journey, I have compiled a set of 31 reference architectures created by users across the continuous delivery and DevOps communities.

     CD and DevOps tool chain

    Each architecture is accompanied by a link to the original presentation or blog where the architecture was referenced to ensure you have access to the full context of the discussion. You can also freely download the presentation from SlideShare where we now have over 7,000 views.

    Offer to help others: If you have a reference architecture to share, please consider posting a link to it in the comments section below.  I am sure others would love to see it and learn from it.

  • Get started with Docker with video training course from O’Reilly

    Get started with Docker with video training course from O’Reilly

    Container platforms seem to be the fuel driving the next wave of app development. Docker didn’t invent the concept, but Docker’s meteoric rise made container technology mainstream. Don’t worry if you’re still not quite sure what Docker is or how to use it—O’Reilly Media has you covered with its Introduction to Docker video training course.

    Catch the Docker wave

    If you aren’t already on the Docker bandwagon you’re a little behind the curve at this point. Docker breaks down barriers and enables developers to deploy apps more effectively and efficiently with less effort than traditional application development and deployment technologies. Docker lets you build an app in any language, and run it on any platform that supports Docker containers.

    At this point there aren’t many platforms that don’t support Docker. It has quickly become the de facto standard for container technologies. Microsoft has its own Windows Server Containers and recently introduced more secure Hyper-V Containers, but it also partnered with Docker to bring Docker containers to Azure, and it is working with Docker to integrate native support for Docker in the next release of Windows Server.

    In a nutshell, Docker is here to stay. If you’re developing and deploying apps its imperative that you know what Docker is and how to use it or you may get left in the dust.

    Learning Docker

    The Docker video training is presented by Andrew Tork Baker. Baker is an independent consultant based in Washington, DC and is a respected resource when it comes to Docker containers. He also goes by the handle “atbaker” and wrote spin-docker—a lightweight open-source Platform-as-a-Service powered by Docker and Flask.

    The entire training session is one hour and 46 minutes and costs $60 to download or stream from O’Reilly. You can watch the first three segments—about 10 minutes worth of content—for free to get a feel for the scope and quality before deciding whether or not to purchase the training.

    The video quality is adequate. Baker speaks a tad fast in parts—probably an effort to prevent the training from running too long or becoming boring. Overall, though, he speaks clearly and presents the materials in a way most people should be able to comprehend. That said, it’s an introductory course so don’t go into this planning on being a Docker guru in a couple hours.

    Baker covers a range of topics in the course. He starts from an overview of what Docker is (and isn’t) and how to set up your Docker development environment (both of those segments are part of the free preview), and then moves on to basic Docker concepts, working with containers, and finally to more advanced areas like Dockerfiles and how to deploy a Docker app to the cloud. The training concludes with recommendations for additional resources to continue diving deeper and learning more about Docker.

    There are only a handful of reviews for the Introduction to Docker video training course so far, but they’re all positive. So far it has an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, and all of the reviewers would recommend the training to a friend. The reviews do stress that it’s an introductory course, though—just enough to give you a basic understanding.

    If you’re new to Docker or container technologies and want to get a grasp on the basics this is probably a good investment of $60 and two hours of your life.

  • Docker Secures $95M in Series D Funding to Meet the Unrivaled Demand for Its Open Source Platform

    Docker Secures $95M in Series D Funding to Meet the Unrivaled Demand for Its Open Source Platform

    Burgeoning Ecosystem Standardizes on Docker to Transform How Applications Are Built, Shipped and Run in the Modern Datacenter

    SAN FRANCISCO – April 14, 2015 – Docker, Inc., the organization behind the open platform for distributed applications, today announced that it has raised $95 million of Series D funding. This latest infusion builds on the successful Series C round raised in September, and enables Docker to address the needs of the millions of ecosystem users and thousands of enterprises that have standardized on Docker’s technology. The financing will enable deeper integration with go-to-market partners such as AWS, IBM and Microsoft, who have made strategic product investments in support of Docker’s open source technology. It will also fuel new platform capabilities across the application development lifecycle, solidifying Docker as the foundation for a new generation of distributed applications.

    The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with new contributions from Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round.

    “This financing is a strong vote of confidence in Docker management, and strengthens the company’s ability to fulfill the needs of the millions of developers who have made the commitment to utilizing its breakthrough products and services in their daily work,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners. “Docker will be able to continue to make additional hires in general to put more critically-needed products into the hands of developers.”

    Docker’s model enables any application to be built and run as a consistent, low-overhead Docker container, liberating developers from infrastructure concerns and dramatically increasing innovation. Enterprises using Docker have reported that it shrinks deployment cycles from weeks to minutes and drives up to 20X improvement in computing resource efficiency. More than 300 million instances of Docker’s technology have been downloaded from its hosted service, Docker Hub, enabling organizations to create both an agile application environment and an agile organization.

    “Our responsibility is to give people the tools they need to create applications that weren’t possible before,” said Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker. “We will continue to honor that commitment to developers and enterprises. We think they are still looking for a platform that helps them build and ship applications in a truly standardized way, without lock-in or unwanted bundled features. That is what we set out to build, and we are not yet content with what we have achieved so far. We are getting a clear message from the market that they like what we are building, and we plan to keep building it. The financing enables us to deliver on that promise.”

    Dockerized applications are enabling increased productivity and continuous business innovation for organizations such as the BBC, Gilt, Goldman Sachs, Groupon, ING, Spotify and Yelp. Companies like these are often initially exposed to Docker by a few development teams that integrate Docker into their workflows and are able to immediately demonstrate the productivity benefits of the platform across the development organization. These grassroots efforts quickly receive executive attention when, almost overnight, application enhancements take minutes when they used to take months.

    “With the accelerating pace of digitization in the financial industry, the breadth, complexity and diversity of our software and infrastructure services has grown materially,” said Don Duet, global co-head of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs. “The ability to manage and run business-critical technology at scale in an agile and adaptive ecosystem has become fundamental to our firm. When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications. It inspired us to move towards a standardized infrastructure for packaging, shipping and running our applications based on Docker’s technology.”

    An April 2015 survey of 685 enterprise CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research highlights that Docker technology has the strongest buying intention score (known as a Net spending intentions score or “NET score”) ever recorded in the six years of the firm’s research, which covers 274 technology vendors across 24 sectors of enterprise technology. This aligns with the positive feedback that Docker has received on its flagship commercial product, Docker Hub Enterprise, which is being beta trialed by a number of Fortune 100 companies and will be made broadly available later this quarter.

    “The combination of strong product demand and a rapidly-expanding ecosystem has put Docker on a growth trajectory far beyond what most companies experience in this phase of their development,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This type of financial support, in addition to the high caliber of this group of investors, provides Docker with the resources and guidance needed to meet the demands of all aspects of our community – from open source contributors to Fortune 100 enterprises. Over the course of the last six months, we’ve exceeded every growth milestone we set for the company and the community. With the continued support of our investors, partners and community, Docker will continue to disrupt organizational conventions, transforming monolithic teams, processes and applications into more productive and agile microservices environments.”

    Additional Information

    About Docker, Inc.
    Docker, Inc. is the company behind the Docker open source platform, and is the chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem. Docker is an open platform for developers and system administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications. With Docker, IT organizations shrink application delivery from months to minutes, frictionlessly move workloads between data centers and the cloud, and can achieve up to 20X greater efficiency in their use of computing resources. Inspired by an active community and by transparent, open source innovation, Docker containers have been downloaded 300 million times and Docker is used by millions of developers across thousands of the world’s most innovative organizations, including eBay, Baidu, the BBC, Groupon, ING, Yelp, Spotify, Yandex, and Cambridge HealthCare. Docker’s rapid adoption has catalyzed an active ecosystem, resulting in more than 100,000 “Dockerized” applications, over 40 Docker-related startups,  and integration partnerships with AWS, Cloud Foundry, Google, IBM, Microsoft, OpenStack, Rackspace, Red Hat and VMware.

    Docker, Inc. is venture backed by AME Cloud Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Northern Trust, Sequoia Capital, SV Angel , Trinity Ventures, and Y Combinator.

  • Hyper-V Containers combine virtualization with containerization

    Hyper-V Containers combine virtualization with containerization

    Containers are all the rage these days. You’re just not cool if you’re not using Docker or some other container technology to build and deploy your IT infrastructure. Traditional containers, however, lack sufficient security for some industries and companies, so Microsoft developed Hyper-V Containers.

    Container platforms like Docker and Rocket have significant momentum and have quickly become established as a de facto way of developing and deploying applications. Microsoft already entered into an arrangement to bring native Docker container support to Windows Server, but now it is going a step farther by creating Hyper-V Containers that combine the agility of containers with the security of virtualization.

    Hyper-V Containers ensure that code running in one container object remains completely isolated. The Hyper-V Container object cannot impact other container objects or the host operating system, or vice versa, because it is a separate virtualized container. Mike Neil, general manager of Windows Server for Microsoft, explained in a blog post, “Leveraging our deep virtualization experience, Microsoft will now offer containers with a new level of isolation previously reserved only for fully dedicated physical or virtual machines, while maintaining an agile and efficient experience with full Docker cross-platform integration.”

    IT admins will appreciate the fact that Hyper-V Containers can be created and deployed using the same development and management tools used for traditional Windows Server Containers and that they integrate with Docker for cross-platform deployment. Neil points out that applications developed as Windows Server Containers can easily be deployed as Hyper-V Containers without any modification—enabling organizations to take existing containerized apps and re-deploy them in a more secure manner.

    It seems like security is always an afterthought to any new technology concept, and containers is no exception. It started out as a good idea that caught fire, but it wasn’t until it hit critical mass and achieved mainstream adoption that security became a factor. As larger companies, or organizations in highly-regulated industries look at jumping on the container bandwagon, though, security becomes a mandatory component.

    Virtualization has been used in hosted environments for years as a means of isolating different systems running on the same physical hardware or network. Microsoft’s Hyper-V Containers take those same principles and apply them at the container app level so that security-conscious organizations can have some peace of mind and remain compliant with security mandates as they embrace containerization.

    Microsoft’s strategy of integrating Windows Server Containers and native Docker support in Windows Server and Azure was a big step in the right direction. Adding the security of Hyper-V Containers is brilliant. Microsoft is doing an excellent job of pivoting its business model and not just embracing cloud and DevOps technologies, but raising the bar and taking the lead.

    As a side note Microsoft also announced Nano Server—a new minimal footprint implementation of Windows Server optimized for cloud hosting and container technologies. The Nano Server installation includes the bare minimum components necessary. Microsoft claims the result is smaller server images, faster deployment times, decreased network bandwidth consumption, and reduced administrative overhead. In other words a Nano Server installation of Windows Server will just do what it’s supposed to do with minimal interaction or oversight so IT personnel can focus on more important things like the Hyper-V Container apps running on it.

  • Local DevOps NYC: Container Summit coming to NYC

    Local DevOps NYC: Container Summit coming to NYC

    Container Summit (https://www.joyent.com/containersummit) is a half-day technology conference in NYC on April 8th, focused on the future of containers in production. The event features container and microservices experts from Gartner, Walmart, Lucera, and Shopify as well as container ecosystem players like Docker, Tutum, InfoSiftr and Joyent. The goal of the event is to share best practices and user stories in an interactive forum.

    The event ends with a cocktail hour at the venue, the W Hotel in midtown, which is a great opportunity to network with members of the broader technical community. I am planning to be there and have extended the invitation to the members of DevOps and Automation meetup group in NJ.   Please join me and fellow DevOps enthusiasts at this event.

    container show

  • Puppet Labs talks Docker and containerization

    Puppet Labs talks Docker and containerization

    Last week Puppet Labs released a new version of Puppet Enterprise that brought forward a number of new features, including those to Puppet Node manager that helps automate the provisioning of infrastructure from containers to bare metal, as well as a new AWS module that helps automate provisioning, configuration and management of AWS resources using Puppet. As a part of the release, Puppet announced it was officially supporting a Puppet module for Docker that has been kicking around Puppet Forge since the containerization tool went open source.  With 90,000 downloads behind it and many more customers clamoring for advice on how to better automate workflows in Puppet-controlled infrastructure while using Docker, the module had gained critical mass. devopsy.kinsta.cloud took the announcement as an opportunity to catch up with Gareth Rushgrove, senior software engineer with Puppet and author of the Docker module, to discuss containerization and how Puppet is working to help customers take better advantage of container environments.

    What do you consider some of the biggest challenges when deploying containers in the real world? And how is Puppet Labs hoping to help customers get the most out of Docker?

    I think the first thing is really just…

     

    –THIS STORY HAS BEEN MOVED TO CONTAINER JOURNAL–

  • 8 Signs of Docker Ecosystem Empire-Building

    8 Signs of Docker Ecosystem Empire-Building

    Docker’s meteoric rise on the strength of the continuous delivery movement’s thirst for containerization has been nothing short of remarkable. There’s perhaps no bigger sign of Docker’s uptake than in the build-up of its third-party ecosystem. The past year has seen partnerships galore from Docker and the biggest IT industry players,  plus notable support of the Docker ecosystem amongst key service providers. Here’s our take on some of the cross-industry relationships that will make the Docker ecosystem stronger.

    1. Google

    Google has had a big hand in helping to foster a collaborative Docker community, notably with the open source release of its Kubernetes container cluster manager. The project has gained tons of cross-industry support from IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and more.  Google is further strengthening its ties in collaboration with Mirantis Partners with the reveal last month that Goog would work on a project with the OpenStack firm to  simplify the installation and management of Kubernetes applications on OpenStack.

    2. VMware

    Late last summer, VMware announced that it was working alongside Google, Pivotal and Docker to make it easier for enterprises to scale container-based applications on VMware infrastructure. As part of the deal, VMware agreed to collaborate on open source projects like libswarm, libcontainer and libchan, and to work with Docker to improve interoperability between Docker Hub, vCloud Air, vCenter Server and vCloud Automation Center.

    3. RedHat

    Just this month, Red Hat brought to fruition its plans to support Docker and other containerization technologies with the launch of its Red Hat Enterprise  Linux Atomic  Host operating system. Based on work done in the Project Atomic open source project, the OS is meant to offer a reliable platform for Docker, Kubernetes, Flannel and others for the enterprise market.

    4. Amazon

    For the past year Amazon has been bending over backwards to help customers more effectively leverage Docker on AWS infrastructure. Most notable was its big splash last November with the launch of its EC2 Container service (ECS), designed to simplify the management of Docker containers across a managed cluster of EC2 instances. It continues to add to that service—last month it provided updated enhancements to ECS that makes it able to use images stored in private docker repositories and to mount volumes in containers in ECS. 

    5. Rackspace

    Rackspace’s long-running relationship with Docker starts first as a user, but extended notably beyond that in June last year when it was working to contribute to the Libswarm project and had created a backend plug-in for Libswarm that would enable its users to launch Rackspace Cloud Servers directly from the Docker CLI. 

    6. IBM

    After a year full of big wins for the Docker ecosystem in 2014, it ended with a bang in November when IBM joined forces with the containerization upstart to integrate it into a range of applications for the enterprise market. As a part of the partnership, IBM launched IBM Containers, a Docker-based service delivered as a part of its Bluemix open cloud platform for application development. 

    7. Microsoft

    Microsoft has been incrementally upping the ante with its Docker relationship, starting in June 2014 when it added support for Docker  Microsoft added support for Docker in Microsoft Azure on Linux VMs. By October it had publicly committed to support Docker on future Windows Server releases, by adding resources to implement in-house tweaks to Windows Server and to support the open-source development of the Docker Engine for Windows Server. And in January Microsoft showed its commitment to the partnership with the release an Ubuntu image fully integrated with Docker and ready to deploy from the Microsoft Azure marketplace. 

    8. Puppet Labs               

    The most recent among Docker’s ecosystem wins, Puppet Labs this week pushed forward a new version of Puppet Enterprise  that includes a special module specifically for managing the Docker Platform and launching containers in Puppet-managed infrastructure.  The idea is to help users side-step configuration issues with the Docker daemon running containers.

  • Linux Containers & Security Implications

    Linux Containers & Security Implications

    Does the word “container” intimate containment, suggesting that containers are inherently secure? If it does, any such assumption of security may be the broadest Docker vulnerability to date.

    aaron cois“One of the biggest threats I see with Docker is its positioning and the implied security in the language. The reality is that these containers don’t contain anything,” says Aaron Cois, Researcher, CERT Division, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Yet, that is the implication.

    Just as those who thought Linux or VMs were secure enough on their own were mistaken, so those who believe that containers put a lid on security will be sorely disappointed. Today, Linux environments require network, OS / host security, Internet security, and web application security measures similar to those used with other platforms. Tools like security auditing / PEN testing, firewalls / WAFs, anvi-virus and anti-malware tools, DLP, IDS/IPS, remediation tools, and really the gamut of security measures similar to what Microsoft environments require are increasingly needed to defend data in Linux environments. “Likewise, operations can give developers tools to log into the VSphere console to create and change VMs while limiting their privileges,” says Cois.

    And so, containers also require appropriate security measures. “Developers and non-admin operations staff don’t need to log into the host command line to work, and no one in security wants them to,” says Cois. But today’s Docker workflow not only permits but requires it.

    The Root of the Problem…

     

    –THIS STORY HAS BEEN MOVED TO CONTAINER JOURNAL–