DockerCon highlights

Written by: Michael Neale

As I mentioned before, I attended DockerCon this week.

Lots has happened - and I expect more to fall out from it (keep an eye out for videos) but I thought some quick points are worth highlighting here that are relevant:

Keynote and launch of the Docker Hub:

The keynote featured a fairly ambitious demo (slides here ) (which worked, and the demo-gods were thanked many times) - that involved changing an image, running it through a pipeline that involved "integration tests" in Jenkins - before finally simultaneously deploying to several clouds (which all happened to work):

The docker hub stores (and builds) docker repositories (images) - based on the Dockerfiles which can be stored as source in Github or Bitbucket - make a change to one of these - it does a fairly standard trigger that fires off a build. The hub then fires off a webhook - which triggers Jenkins to test/validate (and ultimately do some workflow around this version of the image) before approving it back to the hub (the hub can then tag it) - finally the deployment step was triggered to deploy the image (container) to various clouds.

The demo was a very basic version of a pipeline - which involved the hub building and storing images (this is now something that is offered to open source repos and for private repos on the docker hub) - but then the pipeline/workflow and testing delegated to Jenkins (the actual demo was meant to be something a tad more sophisticated here, but time ran out!).

Watch this space - there is work afoot for workflow/pipeline and integration with the docker hub.

It is interesting to me to see the focus of the docker hub around images and the "provenance" of those images - and then delegating to Jenkins and other tools for workflow/pipeline and testing - use the best tool for the job etc.

Lib swarm

A subsequent keynote mentioned a whole lot of new modules around docker - the most interesting of which to me could end up being libswarm . This looks like it is shaping up to be the way in which deployments of containers in a cross cloud/network portable way can finally happen. I will keep a close eye on this as it could solve quite a lot of things.

Videos

All of the conference was recorded - so I will expect good quality videos of all the sessions to be available soon - keep an eye out for them.

Maturity of containers

There were several talks that focussed on extensive experience with containers (from Twitter/mesos, to Google) - as docker builds on the linux container tech that has been proven, this was seen as strong evidence that docker containers are possibly more mature than the mere 1 year age of the project indicates (and yes, people are running it in production in various ways!).

Apache Mesos was mentioned a few times - both by Twitter and eBay in talks (eBay covered their latest work with using it with Jenkins builds - they now host both thousands of Jenkins controllers and agents all in mesos - alongside other production workloads).

Vendor participation

All the big vendors were there in some way endorsing docker and announcing further integration or partnership - this was good to see - and all of it seemed very sincere - from Microsoft to Google to IBM and more.

General vibe

This is a healthy opensource project with good prospects. I think a lot of people are betting more and more on docker as their containerisation platform (and containerisation in general). If you are interested - do look out for the videos - there should be a lot of good content in them.

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