Category: AWS

Perspective from the Inside: A Couple Weeks In

After my first few weeks at Docker, I wanted to quickly follow up on my first blog post.

First off, I would like to share my progress towards my promised contribution to the Docker open source project. I made two pull requests:

  1. A Docker image that lets you convert an image to an ascii image. I used the jp2a utility for it. Try it out for yourself: https://github.com/mtesselH/jp2a

To run it:

$ docker run -it mtesselh/jp2a <url to your favorite image>

Here is an example:

marianna-whale

I made a request to make it an official image but, while everyone had fun playing with the new image, it was deemed not suited to be an official image for the Docker Hub Official Image library. It is now in my Docker Hub account where you can access it using the above command.

  1. I also fixed a simple bug, here is the link (forgive my typo in the title, it was late):

https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/9211

It was officially merged into Docker!

Thanks to crosbymichael nathanleclaire for helping me with these contributions.

Working through these two PRs helped me learn the architecture and appreciate Docker more fully. It also built my trust in the open source process. I actually liked the fact that my request for creating an official image was declined. That was because most official images are general-purpose building blocks while my image was more of an app and so didn’t fit the bill. It is great that the integrity of the project is held to a high standard.

Other random things I’ve observed and learned:

  • Go doesn’t seem too hard to learn if you know C.
  • Attending AWS re:Invent was great. Talking to users and hearing about how they use Docker was eye opening. Even though we brought 1500(!) t-shirts with us, we didn’t have enough to give to all the people who stopped by the booth.
  • Here is a photo of the line of people waiting for the Docker-led session at re:Invent.

aws

  • More than 1400 people signed up and another session was offered to meet the incredible demand.  Now I’m getting ready to for the same kind of enthusiasm for our own DockerCon Europe this week
  • Working in and commuting to San Francisco has pluses and minuses:
    • Pluses: good places for coffee and food; lots of other startups around to collaborate with.
    • Minuses: I need to get used to a longer commute.
    • Oddities: all sorts of things you have to do in the city. For example, I actually had a formal orientation to the parking garage. Really!
  • Animal friendly: Everyone thinks of whales when they think of Docker, but the big animal “on campus” at the Docker offices is a tortoise named Gordon. He has been around since the dotCloud days and has been developing rather nicely. On a nice day, he likes to roam around on our desks.

I thought it will be a good idea to finish up with the following ASCII image of Gordon generated by my jp2a container:

marianna-turtle

Happy Holidays and see you at DockerCon Europe in Amsterdam!

 

Docker-based Multi-Container Applications Run on AWS Cloud with Introduction of the EC2 Container Service

ec2

It was great to have Werner Vogels up on stage talking about “why developers love containers.”  That was a wonderful lead in to my Docker presentation in front of the 13,500+ person audience at AWS re:Invent listening to Werner’s keynote.  That kind of visibility is inspiring, but the thing I’m most excited about today is what great news there is for Docker and AWS customers with the launch of the Amazon EC2 Container Service.

This new product reflects AWS’ customer-driven approach to their cloud services and a recognition that their application developer community is clamoring for more Docker-based capabilities.  One can understand why, after listening to fellow keynote presenter Pristine highlight their application that provides seamless, secure Google Glass communication powered by Docker and AWS.  Pristine’s application is reshaping industries like healthcare where it can bring remote providers to the point of care in a new highly interactive fashion.

The initial focus of the Amazon EC2 Container Service is to address multi-container multi-host clustering, which aligns with customer requirements for high-performance and scale as they move their Dockerized distributed applications into production. We are thrilled that Amazon is pursuing a Docker-native approach to clustering.

The Amazon EC2 Container Service is a great follow-up to their announced support of Docker containers in Elastic Beanstalk in April of this year.   Both are signs of AWS’ commitment to Docker containers.  The launch of the Amazon EC2 Container Service comes with collaboration around Docker Hub our hosted registry service where Docker container-based applications are distributed, shared and collaborated on across the entire development community, or privately within an organization.  Making Dockerized application “content” directly accessible to AWS customers means that customers have access to over 50,000 Dockerized components that reside in Docker Hub.  These modular components allow an organization to leverage the best content from the community, while focusing its development efforts on a core set of differentiated services.   AWS also contributes directly to the Docker Hub Official Repository program most recently contributing a Dockerized GlassFish application server.

In addition to collaborating on content, both AWS and Docker are focused on improving application portability.  Dockerized applications are instantly portable to any infrastructure-–laptop, bare-metal server, VM or cloud.  Docker has focused on enabling AWS developers directly from their laptops to natively build Dockerized distributed applications on a Docker engine on AWS.  An early technical preview of Docker’s work in this area will be demonstrated today at AWS re:Invent in Session App303:  “Lightning Fast Deploys with Docker and AWS.”

The power of our collaboration can be seen in the results of another joint customer, the Gilt Groupe. Gilt is the market leader in flash e-tail, and has rebuilt its site on a Docker, micro-services based architecture leveraging AWS. “Docker helps us keep services isolated and simplifies our continuous delivery pipeline that in turn encourages innovation and experimentation across all of our teams” said Michael Bryzek, Gilt Groupe, CTO and founder.   Thanks to Docker and AWS, Gilt is able to make real-time changes to their service on average 100 times a day.  The ability to innovate at that pace is where all organizations should want to be with their next generation of distributed applications.

Amazon and Docker have a longer-term plan to provide close integration between the Amazon EC2 Container Service and the growing ecosystem of Docker-based services.  Both AWS and Docker, Inc are focused on enabling developers to quickly and easily take full advantage of container-based applications and deployment.

View AWS blog post

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Docker Hub Official Repos: Announcing Language Stacks

shipping-containers

With Docker containers fast becoming the standard for building blocks for distributed apps, we’re working with the Docker community to make it easier for users to quickly code and assemble their projects.  Official Repos, publicly downloadable for free from the Docker Hub Registry, are curated images informed by user feedback and best practices.  They represent a focused community effort to provide great base images for applications, so developers and sysadmins can focus on building new features and functionality while minimizing repetitive work on commodity scaffolding and plumbing.

At DockerCon last June, we announced the first batch of Official Repos which covered many standard tools like OS distributions, web servers, and databases.  At the time, we had several organizations join us to curate Official Repos for their particular project, including Fedora, CentOS, and Canonical.  And the community responded enthusiastically as well: in the three months since they launched, Official Repos have so grown in popularity that they now account for almost 20% of all image downloads.

Parlez-vous…?

Based on the search queries on the Docker Hub Registry and discussions with many of you, we determined that the community wants pre-built stacks of their favorite programming languages.  Specifically, developers want to get working as quickly as possible writing code without wasting time wrestling with environments, scaffolding, and dependencies.  So we’ve spent the last several months building and curating Official Repos for the eleven most-searched-for programming language stacks. We’ve iterated, tested, and polished, and today we’re sharing them with a wider audience.

Without further ado, we’re pleased to announce the availability of these Official Repos:  c/c++ (gcc), clojure, go (golang), hy (hylang), java, node, perl, php, python, rails, and ruby.  We’re also happy to announce that Amazon Web Services and the Perl and Hy projects have joined the Official Repos program as contributors.

Under The Hood

For details of these language stacks, please check-out the descriptions and Dockerfiles on the individual repos, but below are some highlights:

First off, you’ll see that most of the language stacks are based on the buildpack-deps image, a collection of common build dependencies including development header packages.  This frees users from having to worry about these dependencies – you can just pull the relevant language stack and start coding.

Versions & Tags

Another thing you’ll notice is that each language stack’s Official Repo has multiple versions of the language with a tag for each version.  This lets you quickly pull the specific version you need for your project, for example:

$ docker pull java:8u40

Build On ONBUILD

Another cool feature of these language stacks is that, where applicable, they’ve been built with the ONBUILD Dockerfile instruction.  So when you use a language stack as your base image, your build will automatically add your application code to your new image.  This provides simple automation for your build pipeline while allowing for a clean separation between the language stack and your app’s code and its changes.  See the individual language stack descriptions on the Docker Hub Registry for more details about how to take advantage of this feature.

Got feedback?  Want to contribute?

While we’ve been working on these for the last couple months, we hope today’s release is just the start, not the end.  Like the Docker Engine itself, we think these Official Repos are a good opportunity for the Docker community to collaborate on best practices for these core software building blocks.  To this end, each language stack Official Repo has a comments section and its own GitHub repo for submitting bug fixes and feature ideas.  There’s also an IRC channel, #docker-library on the Freenode IRC network, where the Official Repo maintainers hang out.

Want your own Official Repo?

For those looking to create and maintain an Official Repo of their own project, today we’re happy to share guidelines for getting started, along with Dockerfile best practices.  After prepping your project according to the guidelines, please contact partners@docker.com to coordinate the process of adding your repo to the collection.

—

In closing, we want to warmly thank all those in the community who have been providing input and contributions to Official Repos – without you this program wouldn’t and couldn’t exist.  We hope everyone finds this latest batch useful and we look forward to your feedback and comments.

Dockerize early and often,

– The Docker Team

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Dockercon video: AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Docker

In this video, Evan Brown from AWS explains how to deploy your Containers via a Dockerfile, public repository, or private repository. Evan also highlights the best practices for security and secret management, logging, and scaling and monitoring your Docker Containers on Elastic Beanstalk. You can learn more about Docker and AWS Elastic Beanstalk in this blog post and this video.

 

evan©CurtyPhotography-1051
 

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DockerCon video: Immutable infrastructure with Docker and EC2

In this session, Gilt Co-Founder and CTO Michael Bryzek discusses how Gilt’s engineering team has been experimenting with Docker to improve and simplify end-to-end continuous delivery of their micro-services architecture. Michael also highlights some of the benefits Docker offers to engineers, such as stability, repeatability, and the flexibility to create lightweight environments.

 


gilt
 

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk Launches Support for Docker

If you were surfing AWS’ homepage this morning you may have seen the Docker “win whale” on display.  That’s because today Amazon and Docker are announcing that AWS Elastic Beanstalk, now fully supports running and managing dockerized applications.

This is a great win for developers using Docker and AWS.  After building and testing their application in a Docker container on their laptop, developers can now ship it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which auto-magically manages the runtime provisioning, load balancing, and auto-scaling.  And should developers wish for a bit more runtime control, they can ship the same container – unchanged – to Amazon EC2, which began including Docker in the AWS Linux AMI last month.

With over 1.2 million downloads, over 10,000 dockerized applications, and support in products from AWS, Red Hat, Google, Canonical, IBM, Rackspace, Cloud Foundry, OpenStack, and many others, Docker is quickly becoming the de facto standard for building, shipping, and running applications.  Similarly, as illustrated recently in RightScale’s 2014 State of the Cloud Survey, AWS continues to lead the cloud services market.  Together, Docker and AWS are providing developers with great solutions to accelerate the app lifecycle, from the first line of code to production deployment.  Keep watching this space!

Dockerize early and often,

- The Docker Team

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