Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

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Private repositories on Docker Hub

Sunday, July 16th, 2017

Sometimes Docker Hub really is just the quickest and easiest way to share an image from one place to another, particularly when the place I’m trying to share to is expecting to just do a docker pull. It’s not always the case that I want to share those images with the rest of the world though. Docker Hub’s answer to this is the private repository but, on a free plan, you only get one private repository. What you have to remember though is that a repository can contain multiple images: they all share the same name but each has a different tag.

So, a while back I created a repository in my personal namespace called private and made it private using the button on the settings page:

When I then want to push an image up I use the local name as the tag. For example:

Simple as that. There are obviously limitations here in that I lose the ability to have multiple versions of my image with different tags but so far, for my limited use cases, I’ve been able to live with that. In fairness to Docker Inc, I should say that have multiple private repositories is not the only reason to pay for an account on Docker Hub. You also get the ability to run parallel builds on.

Posted in Docker, Work | Comments Off on Private repositories on Docker Hub

Microservice Builder GA Update

Wednesday, July 12th, 2017

As I posted here on the Microservice Builder beta, I thought it only fair that I should offer an update now that it is Generally Available. There is already the official announcement, various coverage in the press including ZDNet and ADT, a post from my new General Manager Denis Kennelly, and, indeed, my own post on the official blog, so I thought I’d focus on what has changed from a technical standpoint since the beta.

If I start with the developer CLI, the most significant change here is that you no longer need a Bluemix login. Indeed, if you aren’t logged in, you’ll no longer be prompted for potentially irrelevant information such as the sub-domain on Bluemix where you want the application to run. Note, however, that the CLI is still using back-end services out in the cloud to generate the projects so you’ll still need internet connectivity when performing a bx dev create.

Moving on to the next part of the end-to-end flow: the Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline, the Helm chart for this has been modified extensively. It is now based on the community chart which, most significantly, means that it is using the Kubernetes plugin for Jenkins. This results in the use of separate containers for each of the build steps (with Maven for the app build, Docker for the image build, and kubectl for the deploy) and those containers are spun up dynamically as part of a Kubernetes pod representing the Jenkins slave when required.

The Jenkinsfile has also been refactored to make extensive use of a Jenkins library. As you’ll see in the sample projects, this means that the generated Jenkinsfile is now very sparse:

I could say much more about the work we’ve done with the pipeline but to do so would be stealing the thunder from one of my colleagues who I know is penning an article on this subject.

Looking at the runtime portion, what we deploy for the Microservice Builder fabric has changed significantly. We had a fair amount of heartache as we considered security concerns in the inter-component communication. This led us to move the ELK stack and configuration for the Liberty logstash feature out into a sample. This capability will return although likely in a slightly different form. The fabric did gain a Zipkin server for collation and display of Open Tracing data. Again, the security concerns hit home here and, for now, the server is not persisting data and the dashboard is only accessible via kubectl port-forward.

Another significant change, and one of the reasons I didn’t post this immediately, was that a week after we GA’d, IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers morphed into IBM Cloud private. In the 1.2 release, this is largely a rebranding exercise but there’s certainly a lot more to come in this space. Most immediately for Microservice Builder, it means that you no longer need to add our Helm repository as it will be there in the App Center out of the box. It also meant a lot of search and replace for me in our Knowledge Center!

You may be wondering where we are heading next with Microservice Builder. As always, unfortunately I can’t disclose future product plans. What I can do is highlight existing activity that is happening externally. For example, if you look at the Google Group for the MicroProfile community, you will see activity ramping up there and proposals for a number of new components. Several of the Microservice Builder announcements also refer to the Istio service mesh project on which IBM is collaborating with Google. It’s still early days there but the project is moving fast and you can take a look at some of the exciting features on the roadmap.

Posted in Docker, Kubernetes, WebSphere Application Server, Work | Comments Off on Microservice Builder GA Update

Multi-Stage Docker Build

Friday, May 5th, 2017

Docker 17.05 enabled the ability to perform multiple build stages in a single Dockerfile, copying files between them. This brings to regular Docker build a capability that I’ve previously talked about in the context of Rocker, and something that’s of particular use in a compiled language like Java. Let’s see what it would look like in the context of the WebSphere Liberty ferret sample.

The original Dockerfile looks as follows:

We can see that it assumes that the application has already been built and just pulls in the WAR file, in this case from Maven Central. With a multi-stage build we can perform the build of the application and the build of the image in a single Dockerfile:

The first line uses the Maven on-build image to build the application using the source in the same directory as the Dockerfile. Although the stages are given an index by default, naming them using the AS keyword makes the file much more readable. Further down in the Dockerfile we can see that the COPY command takes the built WAR file from the first stage and copies it into the Liberty dropins directory as before. The important thing about all of this is that the final image doesn’t end up with the application source in it, or Maven, or an SDK – just the artifacts that are needed at runtime – thereby keeping down the final image size.

Posted in Docker, Technology, WebSphere Application Server, Work | Comments Off on Multi-Stage Docker Build

Introducing Microservice Builder

Monday, March 27th, 2017

When the frequency of blog posts drops on this site it generally has two causes: I’m busy and/or I’m working on something that’s IBM Confidential. Both of these have been true over the past six months or so whilst I’ve been working on something we’re calling Microservice Builder. A public beta was announced in the run up to InterConnect which went live on the 24th which means that I can now come up for air and say a little about the work we’ve done so far.

Although not limited to Java deployments, Microservice Builder pulls together multiple strands of work that we’ve been doing in the WebSphere space. First, there is the work that is being done in the MicroProfile community to define a set of standard APIs for building microservices in Java. Initially, this took a set of existing Java EE technologies (JAX-RS, CDI and JSON-P) but now additional APIs are being defined. You can start to see the results of this work in the Liberty March beta where there are new features for injecting environmental configuration and utilizing fault tolerance patterns such as timeout, bulkhead and circuit breaker.

Another area where we’ve sought to improve the developer experience is by providing a fast-path to creating new projects. The Liberty App Accelerator has been around for some time now, allowing you to generate Java projects quickly through a web UI. We’ve taken this idea and extended it to cover Swift and Node.js. This can be achieved either through a web UI or through a new plugin to the Bluemix CLI. (Note that generated projects do not need to be deployed to Bluemix.) The plugin goes beyond just generating projects and allows you to build and run them locally using containers. This means that the developer no longer needs to have the prerequisites (e.g. Java, Maven and Liberty) installed locally.

For a runtime environment, we believe containers are a good fit for microservices and in the first instance we’re focusing on Kubernetes. That could be the newly announced Kubernetes in IBM Containers or it could be on-premises with IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers. On top of Kubernetes, Microservice Builder adds a lightweight fabric, installed as a Helm chart, that simplifies deployment of Liberty-based services. Specifically, in this first release it generates key and trust stores to facilitate inter-service communication. It also configures an ELK (Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana) stack to receive and display information including trace, FFDC, garbage collection and HTTP access logs from the Liberty logstashCollector-1.0 feature.

The final strand of Microservice Builder ties together the development and runtime environments via a Jenkins based pipeline. Once again, this is installed as a Helm chart, and is configured to automatically pick up projects from a GitHub or GitHub Enterprise organization. For a Java application, the pipeline will build and test using Maven, before creating a Docker image and pushing it to a registry. The Docker image is then deployed to a Kubernetes cluster using either the same or a separate pipeline.

To show all of this in action, we have taken the sample conference application from the MicroProfile community and broken it apart in to separate projects to deploy using Microservice Builder. Just follow the docs to recreate it in either your local minikube environment or with Spectrum Conductor for Containers.

Posted in Cloud, Docker, WebSphere Application Server, Work | 1 Comment »

Presentations from IBM InterConnect 2017

Sunday, March 26th, 2017

I’m finally back home after what feels like a very long week in Las Vegas at IBM’s InterConnect conference. I promised that I’d post my presentations on SlideShare and I’ll add a few comments here on how each session went.

After an Inner Circle session on Sunday, my first public session of the week was an introduction to containers with WebSphere traditional. This played to a full room which suggests that there is significant interest in the use of containers for existing workloads. Indeed, that was the point of the second half of the session, to describe scenarios where it may make sense to use containers with traditional WebSphere. That’s not to say that it always does and, during one-to-one sessions during the week, I found myself repeatedly cautioning customers against rushing in to the use of containers, particularly with ND, just for the sake of it.

https://www.slideshare.net/davidcurrie/how-to-containerize-websphere-application-server-traditional-and-why-you-might-want-to

My next session covered our new announcement around Microservice Builder. I’ll not say more here as I’ll cover this in a separate post.

https://www.slideshare.net/davidcurrie/microservice-builder-a-microservice-devops-pipeline-for-rapid-delivery-and-promotion

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to deliver this session on Liberty and IBM Containers as it clashed with another that I was presenting. As touched on briefly in this presentation, one of the other announcements at the conference was for support for Kubernetes in IBM Containers. There was lots of excitement around this and I urge you to go and check it out for yourself.

https://www.slideshare.net/davidcurrie/websphere-liberty-and-ibm-containers-the-perfect-combination-for-java-microservices

On Wednesday I had a joint presentation with Brian Paskin looking at options for scalability with Liberty and containers. This was very much Brian’s presentation though so I shan’t post it here. There was an accompanying lab in the afternoon that looked at Liberty collectives and at IBM Containers.

My last session of the week was looking at some of the options when choosing a container orchestration platform: from Liberty collectives, through Swarm and Docker Datacenter, and Kubernetes with IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers and IBM Containers. Many customers I spoke to this week were looking for a single definitive answer here but my response for now is still very much “it depends”.

https://www.slideshare.net/davidcurrie/choosing-a-container-platform-for-your-websphere-applications

Posted in Cloud, Docker, Travel, WebSphere Application Server, Work | Comments Off on Presentations from IBM InterConnect 2017

Find me at IBM InterConnect 2017

Saturday, March 18th, 2017

I’m going to be at IBM’s InterConnect conference this coming week. If you’re going to be there too, there’s a quick run-down of the sessions I’ll be presenting below. The astute will notice that, due to a scheduling snafu, I’m supposed to be presenting two sessions at the same time on Tuesday. If you go to the Liberty/ IBM Containers session then I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with Tom – be kind to him!

If you want to chat about any combination of microservices, containers and WebSphere, you can find me on the microservices ped in the WebSphere area of the expo hall from 5-7:30pm on Tuesday and again from 3-5pm on Wednesday. I’ll be kicking off the latter with a live demo of Microservices Builder, of which more in another post. For Inner Circle customers, I’ll also be talking about this topic at 11am on Sunday.

HAJ-5451 : How to Containerize WebSphere Application Server Traditional, and Why You Might Want To
Date/Time : Mon, 20-Mar, 11:15 AM-12:00 PM
Location : Mandalay Bay South, Level 2 – Surf D
Presenter(s) : David Currie, IBM

BMC-7014 : Roundtable Discussion on Building Java Microservices with WebSphere Liberty
Date/Time : Mon, 20-Mar, 02:00 PM-02:45 PM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – Tropics A
Presenter(s) : Alasdair Nottingham, IBM; David Currie, IBM

BMC-7085 : Meet the Expert on IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty on Docker
Date/Time : Tue, 21-Mar, 02:30 PM-03:15 PM
Location : Concourse, Bayside B, Level 1 – Meet the Experts Forum # 1
Presenter(s) : David Currie, IBM; Tom Banks, IBM

HAM-5526 : IBM Microservice Builder: A Microservice DevOps Pipeline for Rapid Delivery and Promotion
Date/Time : Tue, 21-Mar, 03:45 PM-04:30 PM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – Islander F
Presenter(s) : David Currie, IBM; Jeremy Hughes, IBM

BMC-5983 : WebSphere Liberty and IBM Containers: The Perfect Combination for Java Microservices
Date/Time : Tue, 21-Mar, 03:45 PM-04:30 PM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – South Pacific A
Presenter(s) : David Currie, IBM; Tom Banks, IBM

BMC-7014 : Roundtable Discussion on Building Java Microservices with WebSphere Liberty
Date/Time : Wed, 22-Mar, 08:00 AM-08:45 AM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – Tropics A
Presenter(s) : Alasdair Nottingham, IBM; David Currie, IBM

BMC-2714 : Utilizing WebSphere Application Server Liberty in Docker Containers for Scalability
Date/Time : Wed, 22-Mar, 10:15 AM-11:00 AM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – South Pacific A
Presenter(s) : Brian S. Paskin, IBM; David Currie, IBM

HAJ-2718 : Utilizing IBM WebSphere Liberty in Docker Containers for Scalability (Lab)
Date/Time : Wed, 22-Mar, 01:00 PM-02:45 PM
Location : Mandalay Bay South, Level 3 – South Seas H
Presenter(s) : Brian S. Paskin, IBM; David Currie, IBM

BAS-5901 : Choosing a Container Platform for Your WebSphere Applications
Date/Time : Thu, 23-Mar, 10:30 AM-11:15 AM
Location : Mandalay Bay North, Level 0 – South Pacific A
Presenter(s) : David Currie, IBM; Tom Banks, IBM

Posted in Cloud, Docker, Travel, WebSphere Application Server, Work | Comments Off on Find me at IBM InterConnect 2017

Barcelona Break

Monday, October 31st, 2016

BarcelonaIn general, we’re not very good at combining business trips with pleasure but at half term I was due to be in a conference in Madrid for the latter part of the week and Christine was about to start a new collaboration based in Barcelona so we decided to take the children over to Spain for a few days. Things didn’t get off to a great start with a three-hour delay on our Easyjet flight to Barcelona. To be fair, they did let us know of the delay before we left home and thankfully we’d already made arrangements for late arrival at our apartment.

On Sunday we took the metro to the Sagrada Familia, only to discover that it was sold out for the day. We therefore slowly made our way to Park Güell where we had booked in advance for a late afternoon entrance. Christine went off to the University on Monday whilst the children and I headed to the beach. Unfortunately you could barely see the beach for the mist, let alone the cable car across the harbour that we were intending to take. Luckily, as we waited to board the cable car the mist started to clear and by the time we arrived at Montjuïc the sun was out in force.

We spent some time in the Fort which became quite atmospheric when the mist rolled in again off the sea. Our walk down Plaza d’Espanya was cut short when Duncan failed to clear the large muddy puddle at the bottom of a very steep slide!

Christine was working again on Tuesday. Sadly the mist had turned to drizzle and I headed to the Museu Blau with the children (located dangerously close to the OpenStack summit that was kicking off that day!). For a very modern natural history museum, it seem to specialise in glass cases with large numbers of exhibits in them which wasn’t particularly child friendly. The visit was saved by the temporary National Geographic Spinosaurus exhibition.

In the afternoon, we headed back to the Sagrada Familia having booked our tickets in advance this time. The cathedral has gained a very impressive ceiling since I last entered the building about 10 years ago. Although the rain had stopped by this point, unfortunately the damp conditions meant that we weren’t permitted to ascend the towers.

Having handed the children over to Christine on a metro platform, I took the fast train to Madrid, arriving just in time for the speaker dinner. The rest of the family flew back to the UK the following morning.

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Prometheus and WebSphere Liberty

Monday, October 3rd, 2016

It’s been on my to-do list for some time to try setting up Prometheus to monitor WebSphere Liberty. There is a JMX Exporter which makes the job pretty simple even if there ended up being more steps than I had originally hoped.

My first pass was to try to configure the exporter as a Java agent but sadly the current Java client attempts to use some com.sun packages that don’t work with an IBM JRE. I started down the path of rebuilding our Liberty image on OpenJDK but, when I discovered that the Java agent actually uses Jetty to expose its HTTP endpoint I decided that I really didn’t want that bolted on to the side of my Liberty process! Ideally I’d get the Java client fixed and then create a Liberty feature to expose the HTTP endpoint but that will have to wait for another day… This time round I decided to configure the exporter as an HTTP server in a side-car container.

The first step was to create a Liberty image with monitoring enabled using the following Dockerfile:

And then build and run the image and extract the JMX URL:

Note that, in addition to the normal HTTP and HTTPS ports, we’ve exposed a port (5556) that the exporter container is going to use.

Next we need to build the JMX exporter JAR file using maven:

And we also need a config file for the exporter that uses the JMX_URL that we extracted from the Liberty image earlier:

The pattern here is subscribing us to all the available MBeans. The following Dockerfile constructs an image with these two artifacts based on the openjdk image from Docker Hub:

Note that we tell the exporter to run on the same port that we exposed from the Liberty container earlier. Now we build and run the image. We use the network from our Liberty container so that the exporter can connect to it on localhost. The curl should retrieve the metrics being exposed by the exporter.

The last step is to run Prometheus. Create a prometheus.yml file to provide the scrape configuration:

We can then run the standard Prometheus image from Docker Hub:

You can then access the Prometheus UI in your browser on port 9090 of the host where your Docker engine is running. If you’re new to Prometheus, try switching to the Graph tab, entering the name of a metric (e.g. WebSphere_JvmStats_ProcessCPU) and then hit Execute. If all is well, you should see something along the following lines:

Prometheus UI

If the metrics don’t look all that exciting then try applying a bit of load to the server, such as using the siege tool:

Posted in Docker, WebSphere Application Server, Work | 2 Comments »

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