Docker

This same blog entry is here. Thanks to the cncf folks who helped me put this together.

I’ve attended many conferences before, but I was happy to get the diversity scholarship to attend CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe 2017 in Berlin as there is always so much more to learn. It was my first time attending an event organized by the Linux Foundation, and I hope to attend more in the future. I loved all the insights and advances that I obtained through all of the highlighted Cloud Native projects including Kubernetes, gRPC, OpenTracing, Prometheus, Linkerd, Fluentd and OpenDNS from the variety of industry leaders. The keynotes were quite memorable as well, including the Kubernetes 1.6 updates by Aparna Sinha (Google), Federation from Kelsey Hightower (Google), Kubernetes Security Updates from Clayton Coleman (Red Hat), Helm from Michelle Noorali (Deis), Scaling Kubernetes from Joe Beda (Heptio) and Quay from Brandon Phillips (CoreOS).

Over the last couple of years Docker has seen incredible growth across the tech industry. Its use ties together with deployment of Microservices in most Cloud based companies. Docker is easy to use and its in constant development. In the last month I decided to venture and try something different that has been around even before Docker but in a more primitive form. You see containers have been around before Docker for a long time and even before that with the introduction of chroot in 1979. Containers were first introduced in Solaris in 2005 with the introduction of Solaris Containers, described as ‘chroot’ on steroids. Then later in 2008 with adoption of the Containers name by LXC. (what Docker was based on initially) and also the inclusion of user namespaces in the Linux Kernel 3.8.

For the last few days I’ve been taking at crack at using the recent Docker container deployment tool that I’ve been hearing a lot buzz about. In essence, it’s a wrapper on top of Linux LXC containers, writen in the new friendly and not so popular yet Go language developed at Google.

Just a little bit of background, for those of you not familiar with LXC containers, they are pretty much defined as chroot on steroids. Basically, you can run isolated virtual environments in a single Linux machine and make it look like that they are different machines. These environments give you the advantage of being isalated and at the same they are able to use the same Linux exectutables and memory space to improve speed and footprint size.