David Currie

On 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.

The films on my flight to the US this week weren’t much to write home about so I ploughed through some of my Safari Queue backlog. Two of the Docker related books on my queue were from Packt Publishing.

The first was Mastering Docker by Scott Gallagher which I’ll confess that I only skim read. Parts of the book were already showing their age even though it was only published in December 2015 but that’s inevitable in such a fast-moving area. More problematic was that I found myself disagreeing with the author so much in just the first couple of chapters that I couldn’t believe anything I read after that. By way of just one example: the author asserts that commands are chained together in Dockerfiles to speed build times and seems to suggest that items added in one layer may be removed in another to keep the image size down. The structure of the book is also poor with material repeated throughout. It certainly doesn’t contain the depth to provide mastery in anything!

The second book from the same stable was Monitoring Docker by Russ McKendrick. Maybe it’s just because this is an area that I know less about but I got on better with this book. It covers use of the Docker API (top, stats and logs), cAdvisor and aggregation with Prometheus. The author covers Zabbix in some detail which, I must confess, is a tool that I’d never even heard of, before a gushing endorsement for Sysdig. The book provides an overview of SaaS options (Sysdig Cloud, Datadog and New Relic) before closing with a detailed walk-through of setting up a containerized ELK stack for log aggregation. There are certainly options that the book didn’t cover but I felt it provided good coverage of the considerations to allow the reader to make informed decisions about what they should look for in a monitoring solution.

I also took a look at the early release of Kelsey Hightower’s Kubernetes: Up and Running from O’Reilly. It shows promise but, as it’s not due for release until October, there wasn’t enough content there yet to give a review.

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!

I was lucky enough to be a part of the IBM contingent attending last week’s DockerCon Europe in Barcelona. I had to earn my keep by manning the Code Rally game on the IBM booth (not to mention lugging a suitcase full of laptops to the event and porting the server-side of the game to run on IBM Containers). I did get to attend the sessions though and soak up the atmosphere.

The conference opened with a moving remembrance for those who had died in the Paris attacks the proceeding week led by Docker CTO and former Parisian Hykes. He chose to play Carl Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot which is a though-provoking listen in its own right.

After a somewhat flat opening demo, Soloman return to the stage to introduce the Docker stack: Standards, Infrastructure, Dev Tools and Solutions. He then went on talk about the themes of quality, usability and security. The last of these was accompanied by a great demo of the Yubikey 4 for creating (and revoking) certificates for Docker Content Trust. This was given by Aanand Prasad acting as hapless developer, with Diogo Monica in the role of ops. In a nice touch, everyone in the audience found a Yubikey taped to the side of their seat (although perhaps less interesting for my children than the Lego Moby Dock!). There was also a tip of the hat to the work that my colleague Phil Estes has been leading in the community around user namespace support. The session concluded with a powerful demo of using Docker Swarm to provision 50,000 containers to 10,000 nodes running in AWS.

After racing back to the expo hall to cover the next break, I went to an “Introduction to the Docker Project” which covered how to get involved with contributing (I submitted my first PR the week before, if only to the docs). It finished early so I could also catch a glimpse of the inimitable Jessie Frazzelle doing what she does best: running random stuff under Docker (a Tor relay this time). After lunch Jessie was on again, this time with Arnaud Porterie, to provide a round-up of the latest updates to the Docker engine.

I spent the remainder of the day watching the lightning talk sessions before heading back to the booth for Happy Hour followed by the IBM sponsored conference party at the impressive maritime museum.