Category Archives: Containers

Container Migration 101: Cloudcast.net & Lachlan Evenson

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Last week, the CloudCast.net interviewed Lachlan Evenson (now at Deis!).  I highly recommend listening to the interview because he has a unique and deep experience with OpenStack, Kubernetes and container migration.

15967I had the good fortune of lunching with Lachie just before the interview aired.  We got compare notes about changes going on in the container space.  Some of those insights will end up in my OpenStack Barcelona talk “Will it Blend? The Joint OpenStack Kubernetes Environment.”

There’s no practical way to rehash our whole lunch discussion as a post; however, I can point you to some key points [with time stamps] in his interview that I found highly insightful:

  • [7:20] In their pre-containers cloud pass, they’d actually made it clunky for the developers and it hurt their devops attempts.
  • [17.30] Developers advocating for their own use and value is a key to acceptance.  A good story follows…
  • [29:50] We’d work with the app dev teams and if it didn’t fit then we did not try to make it fit.

Overall, I think Lachie does a good job reinforcing that containers create real value to development when there’s a fit between the need and the technology.

Also, thanks Brian and Aaron for keeping such a great podcast going!

 

 

yes, we are papering over Container ops [from @TheNewStack #DockerCon]

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thenewstackIn this brief 7 minute interview made at DockerCon 16, Alex Williams and I cover a lot of ground ranging from operations’ challenges in container deployment to the early seeds of the community frustration with Docker 1.12 embedding swarm.

I think there’s a lot of pieces we’re still wishing away that aren’t really gone. (at 4:50)

Rather than repeat TheNewStack summary; I want to highlight the operational and integration gaps that we continue to ignore.

It’s exciting to watch a cluster magically appear during a keynote demo, but those demos necessarily skip pass the very real provisioning, networking and security work needed to build sustained clusters.

These underlay problems are general challenges that we can address in composable, open and automated ways.  That’s the RackN goal with Digital Rebar and we’ll be showcasing how that works with some new Kubernetes automation shortly.

Here is the interview on SoundCloud or youtube:

 

Notes from OSCON Container Podcast: Dan Berg, Phil Estes and Rob Hirschfeld

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At OSCON, I had the pleasure of doing a IBM Dojo Podcast with some deep experts in the container and data center space: Dan Berg (@DanCBerg) and Phil Estes (@estesp).

ibm-dojo-podcast-show-art-16x9-150x150We dove into a discussion around significant trends in the container space, how open technology relates to containers and looked toward the technology’s future. We also previewed next month’s DockerCon, which is set for June 19-21 in Seattle.

Highlights!  We think containers will be considered MORE SECURE next year and also have some comments about the linguistic shift from Docker to CONTAINERS.”

Here are my notes from the recording with time stamps if you want to skip ahead:

  • 00:35 – What are the trends in Containers?
    • Rob: We are still figuring out how to make them work in terms of networking & storage
    • Dan: There are still a lot of stateful work moving into containers that need storage
    • Phil: We need to use open standards to help customers navigate options
  • 2:45 – Are the changes keeping people from moving forward?
    • Phil: Not if you start with the right guidelines and architecture
    • Dan: It’s OK to pick one and keep going because you need to build expertise
    • Rob: RackN experience changed Digital Rebar to microservices was an iterative experience
  • 5:00 Dan likes that there is so much experimentation that’s forcing us to talk about how applications are engineered
  • 5:45  Rob points out that we got 5 minutes in without saying “Docker”
    • There are a lot of orchestration choices but there’s confusion between Docker and the container ecosystem.
  • 7:00 We’re at OSCON, how far has the technology come in being open?
    • Phil thinks that open container initiative (OCI) is helping bring a lot of players to the field.
    • Dan likes that IBM is experimenting in community and drive interactions between projects.
    • Rob is not sure that we need to get everyone on the same page: open source allows people to pursue their own path.
  • 10:50 We have to figure out how to compensate companies & individuals for their work
    • Dan: if you’ve got any worthwhile product, you’ve got some open source component of it.  There are various ways to profit around that.
  • 13:00 What are we going to be talking about this time next year?
    • Rob (joking) we’ll say containers are old and microkernels are great!
    • Rob wants to be talking about operations but knows that it’s never interesting
    • Phil moving containers way from root access into more secure operations
    • Dan believes that we’ll start to consider containers as more secure than what we have today.  <- Rob strongly agrees!
  • 17:20 What is the impact of Containers on Ops?  Aka DevOps
    • Dan said “Impact is HUGE!”  > Developers are going to get Ops & Capabilities for free
    • Rob brings up impact of Containers on DevOps – the discussion has really gone underground
  • 19:30 Role of Service Registration (Consul & Etcd)
    • Life cycle management of Containers has really changed (Dan)
    • Rob brings up the importance of Service Registration in container management
  • 20:30 2016.Dockercon Docket- what are you expecting?
    • Phil is speaking there on the contribute track & OCI.
    • Rob is doing the hallway track and looking to talk about the “underlay” ops and the competitive space around Docker and Container.
    • Dan will be talking to customers and watching how the community is evolving and experimenting
    • Rob & Dan will be at Open Cloud Technology Summit, June 22 in Seattle