It was another early start on Day 2 of the conference. It’s not often I leave the hotel before breakfast starts, but fortunately breakfast was being served in the expo hall so I could refuel whilst on duty.
The morning’s general session focussed on the solutions part of the stack that Soloman had introduced the previous day. VP for Engineering, Marianna Tessel, introduced Project Nautilus which, as with the vulnerability scanner in IBM’s Bluemix offering, aims to identify issues with image content held in the registry. This was of interest to me as they have been scanning the official repository images for several months now, presumably including the websphere-liberty image for which I am a maintainer. There was also a demo of the enhancements to auto-builds in Docker Hub and the use of Tutum, Docker’s recent Docker hosting acquisition.
Particularly interesting was Docker’s announcement of the beta of Docker Universal Control Plane. This product offers on-premise management of local and/or cloud-based Docker deployments with enterprise features such as secret management and LDAP support for authentication. Although Docker were at pains to point out that there will still be integrations for monitoring vendors and plugins for alternative volume and network drivers, this announcement, combined with the acquisition of Tutum, puts Docker in competition with a significant portion of its ecosystem.
After lunch I went to sessions on Docker monitoring (didn’t learn much) and on Official Repos. In the latter, Krish Garimella expanded on Project Nautilus and described how the hope is that this will allow them to dramatically scale-out the number of official repositories whilst still ensuring the quality of the content. We also handed out the Raspberry Pis to our Code Rally winners. I was pleased that they all went to attendees who’d spent significant time perfect their cars.
The closing session was also well worth staying for. Of particular note was the hack to manage unikernels using the Docker APIs. If Docker can do for unikernels what it did for containers, this is certainly a project to watch!