Container Camp III

Container CampOn Friday I attended my third Container Camp UK. The venue had changed once more, this time taking up residence in the Picturehouse Central cinema by Piccadilly Circus. As with last year, this meant comfy seats which, contrary to what you might think, actually makes it easier to stay awake! In another repeat from 2015, we started late and connecting to the projector proved problematic throughout the day. This time we had a selection of shiny MacBooks with their new-fangled USB-C connectors to thank!

The great thing about this conference is its independence which means that the sessions during the day covered the complete gamut of container technologies. Here’s a quick run down of the day:

  • Craig Box from Google kicked the day off. His session was billed as covering Kubernetes 1.3 but, as he pointed out, that was old hat with 1.4 due to release within a week. As such, he spent much of the pitch talking about what was coming up. To me it was a reminder to have a play with deploying various WebSphere topologies with Pet Sets.
  • Next up was Ben Firshman, repeating his serverless app talk from DockerCon. I keep meaning to ask whether he knows that OpenWhisk supports Docker containers as actions.
  • Michael Hausenblas from Mesosphere came after the break. He was talking about DRAX, his chaos testing tool for DC/OS.
  • Michael was following by Nishant Totla, giving his first conference presentation. He’s an engineer at Docker working on swarmkit, with orchestration in Docker 1.12 being the subject of his presentation.
  • Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical fame had the last session of the morning. He was talking about snaps for application packaging, particularly in the context of IoT devices.
  • Once the long lunch queue had finally subsided there was a series of lightning talks but, standing about three meters from the speakers, I still couldn’t hear half of what was said against the background. I’ll have to wait for the replays.
  • After lunch, Jonathan Boulle from CoreOS talked about the rkt container runtime and, in particular, the work that has been done to integrate it in to Kubernetes. Undoubtedly factoring the Docker-specifics out of Kubernetes has been beneficial to the project. It remains to be seen whether rkt overtakes Docker as the runtime of choice.
  • George Lestaris (now working on Garden for Pivotal) was talking about the project to use the CernVM File System as the backing for a container layered file system. Consider what if the large proportion of the content of many images that is never touched by the running process was never pulled across the file system?
  • Liz Rice had borrowed Julz Friedman’s pitch on building containers from scratch with Go. It was interesting to compare Liz’s style of “oh look – what would happen if I tried this?” versus Julz’s “let me show you my skills”!
  • Gareth Robertson then took to the stage briefly to plug RC1 for Label Schema which seeks to standardise a base set of Docker image labels.
  • After another break, Ed Robinson from Reevoo gave an entertaining pitch on the Træf?k reverse proxy. He talked about cheese a little bit too much though as this was point a mouse started to repeatedly traverse the flooring in front of me!
  • Chris Van Tuin from Red Hat gave an OpenShift pitch, lightly disguised as a presentation on container security.
  • Dustin Kirkland, another Canonical employee was talking about LXD and HPC. My attention started to drift at this point as watching the activities of the mouse proved more entertaining!
  • Docker Captain Alex Ellis rounded off the day with a Swarm/Raspberry Pi/IoT demo. You can’t beat a few flashing lights to please the audience!

Everything was being recorded so keep checking back on the conference YouTube channel for any sessions that peak your interest.

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