Kiratech is participating to its first DockerCon in San Francisco! We want to discover all the news and the future development of the open-source containers application projects. During this occasion, in particular, we are happy to officially announce our Partnership with Docker, as Consultant Partner.
Starting from Day 1 Keynote: the general session started with a cartoon video that explained the Docker Project from the initial Solomon Hykes container idea, to its final development and Docker creation. After the video, Docker CEO Ben Golub, came on the scene and talked about the various startups he’s worked for and the importance of his “two fold test” that he does for any company he works for, which consists in explaining what the company does to your family during Thanksgiving. He hasn’t been successful in this with Docker, but he thinks in any case, that Docker has reached a Global significance. Docker is taking an important and determining role in how companies build, ship and run distributed applications and that Docker is determining a real transformation in industries and Company cultures. The success, in his opinion, must be assigned to the Docker community and Docker ecosystem. Docker owes its success to its ecosystem; based on companies that created namespaces, LXC tools, Cgroups, the other technologies that Docker uses, Docker Contributors (approximately 1,300), its community and its supporters, its employees and, last but not least, to Docker users.
They have 158 groups in 58 countries and in one year the numbers have increased a lot:
- The number of contributors has increased from 460 to 1,300
- The number of jobs in Docker increased from 2,500 to 43,000
- There has been a 18,082% increase in container downloads
Golub, then announced that Docker, thanks to contributions given to the DockerProject, in its program of supporting the Oceanic Society, has finally adopted a real blue whale, named Molly Dock, which symbolizes the Docker Moby Dock logo.
Docker has evolved from starting as an interesting project, to becoming a solution and now a platform and movement. Golub then resumed the future of Distributed Applications in 5 steps:
- Creation of a lightweight container
- Container becoming standard interoperable and easy to use
- Creation of an ecosystem
- Empowerment of a multi-container model
- Creation of a platform that manages the whole
He had announced the 5-steps last year in honor of DockerCon 2014 and in the last days, has been proud to notice that points 1,2 and 3 have been accomplished and that now it’s time to develop points 4 and 5.
At the end of his speech, Golub remembered that DockerCon 2015 would have been all about Docker in production. Docker wants to be a solution for everyone, which can be run everywhere, extensible and pluggable.
After this, Golub welcomed Solomon Hykes on the stage, Founder and CTO of Docker, Inc.
Hykes started thanking the contributors and the community, billions of creative people and the incredible technology that they continue to improve. Docker mission is to build mass innovation tools. Hykes explained that Docker can be the bridge between the new technology and billions of people around the world that want to build new ideas but don’t have the tools to do it. Programming is the biggest innovation multiplier, he said, and the ambitious achievement we have is “making the Internet “programmable””. In the next 5 years, predicts Hykes, Docker is going to build a software layer to make the Internet programmable.
Hykes, listed then the 4 big goals:
- Reinvent the programmer’s toolbox
- Build better plumbing
- Promote open standards
- Help organizations solve real problems in unique ways
The first goal is fundamental; building distributed applications is a focal point. But tools are not adequate, because they are designed before distributing applications. It’s important to improve developer experience and the solution to this is the “incremental revolution”, based on three points:
- Choose a problem
- Solve it in the simplest possible way
- Repeat it
In Hykes opinion, the incremental revolution flows in a big change, but faces each issue step by step. The past two years have been approached with the incremental revolution concept. The container runtime, for example, follows the approach: images, Docker Compose, Docker Machine and Docker Swarm have been structured solving problem by problem, one by one.
Docker is going to use the incremental revolution also in Docker experimental releases. In this way, companies and developers will have the opportunity to test the new solutions Docker releases before they are officially released.
Linking to this, Hykes started talking about “Networking.” He believes that machines and the network should be part of the application and should conform to what the application needs. The Docker Network is an experimental feature resulting from Docker and Socketplane joint work. It will support native multi-host networking out of the box.
The Micro-segmentation built in Docker Network:
– will allow people to assemble any kinds of virtual networks
– is built on industry standards
– it leverages DNS for service discovery
- it is pluggable and extensible
After Hykes speech, Ben Firshman started a demo of Docker Network. Firshman began to show the usage of VMware Fusion driver for Docker Machine in order to deploy some containers defined via Docker Compose to run an application on his local laptop. Then he started to deploy this application into production with Docker Swarm and Docker Network. He created the Swarm cluster using Docker Machine and again, showed what the application definition looked like using Docker Compose. Next, Firshman ran “docker-compose scale” to increase the number of web containers to allow a bigger scale.
The next announcement has been Docker Plugins, another experimental release. This allows programmers to modify behaviors by adding their own plugins via extension points and extension points exist for networking, volumes, schedulers, and service discovery. Plugins are also multi-tenant. This feature allows to load multiple plugins at the same time and to assign different plugins for different applications.
Continuing to talk about the Docker ecosystem, Hykes gave the stage to Deepak Singh, who is responsible for Amazon Web Services and Amazon ECS. Singh started talking about Amazon’s history with Docker, in particular regarding adding a Docker-enabled AMI and adding Docker support to Beanstalk. All this allowed the introduction of EC2 Container Service (ECS). At this point Singh announced that in the next year there will be the possibility to use Docker Swarm and Docker Compose natively with Amazon ECS.
This brought again the topic of reinventing the developer’s toolbox issue and Hykes started to refer to the second big goal: building better plumbing. Hykes listed the rules of software plumbing:
- Re-use existing plumbing
- Make new plumbing easy to be used and improved
- Follow the UNIX principles
- Define standard interfaces for assembling small tools with larger systems
Docker and its eco-system have reused a lot plumbing to build the final solution (50% of Docker’s source code is plumbing). Hykes has showed again his appreciation and revealed how important Amazon is for Docker.
Hykes announced a demo by Diogo Monica of Notary. Notary is a trusted publishing system, an agnostic platform distributing any content over any transport, using industry-leading cryptographic research. Notary comes from the Docker Plumbing Project.
Another part of plumbing that will be put in place through the Docker Plumbing Project regards the OS containers and that is runC. runC is described as a universal runtime for OS containers that supports all the security features of Linux, supporting user namespaces and live migration. runC defines a standard, portable, runnable format and it is usable from the command line or programming.
At the end of the Keynote, Hykes said that the real value of Docker is not the technology, but the community of people that agrees on something — in particular here, in the container runtime. Docker has the responsibility to make this become a proper standard. A proper standard has 5 main features:
- A formal specification
- An independent governance
- A neutral reference implementation
- A support from a coalition
- An open mind to fresh ideas
Hykes closed talking about the Open Container Format, a universal intermediary format for OS containers. To give it an independent governance, Docker established a partnership with Linux Foundation to create the Open Container Project, which will be the head of Open Container Format. To deliver the neutral reference implementation, Docker is donating all of runC to the Open Container Project. In order to give an idea of the broad support, Hykes read a list of vendors that have started working on the project (Cisco, EMC, Fujitsu, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Pivotal, Rancher, Red Hat, and VMware). The open mind to fresh ideas feature is given by the fact that all of the maintainers are joining the Open Container Project as founding members.
This is just scratching the surface of what was discussed in the Day 1 keynote. Stay tuned to read tomorrow’s day 2 Keynote post.
If you want to read about day 2 Keynote click here: http://www.kiratech.it/2015/day-2-at-dockercon-a-great-day-of-new-features-and-products-announcements/
