Dutch Docker Day 2015
Author: David Negreira
A small group of the Elements team went to the Dutch Docker Day, along with ex-colleague Jeroen to learn more about what others are doing with Docker, understand the whole environment surrounding Docker and how can we use it in order to get our development process better andmore efficient. The conference was a bit different from other conferences: As the event was held inside the beautiful Zuiderkerk church, we had the privilege to hear a gospel choir singing to open the day!
After that the presentations started with Rik Farenhorst, Business Unit Manager at organizer Xebia, explaining that, using Agile methodologies, they achieved to organize the conference in only 9 weeks. The whole setup for the day was a bit different on how conferences are usually organized as there was no clear schedule for the lunch, so in order to avoid queues food was available all the time. There was also no specific schedule for the workshops and the only agenda were the speeches given.
Everyone was handed a headset so you would be able hear the speaker anywhere in the room, but in some spots of the venue it was difficult to get the signal, but still a good idea. Due to this, he explained that the conference purpose was to be a bit chaotic and at the same time avoid huge lines for eating, toilets and everyone rushing for the same place at the same time. They nailed it nicely, since we had the freedom to roam around the conference without losing too much details on the talks of the speakers. There was a also a confessionary to confess your Docker sins and a Docker doctor to consult and askany Docker-related questions straight to the Docker pros.
Next was the talk by Iain Gray, senior vice president Customer Success at Docker, Inc. He explained and talked about how Docker has changed the world for development and operations, comparing how the IT world was before and how it is now. There is a big shift on how IT is being dealt with, empowering developers to run infrastructure on their own laptop and still enabling the IT operations team to have control and vision on what is happening on the infrastructure.
After Iain Gray’s talk both David de Sousa and me decided to give the workshops a try and test the headsets during the workshops. In the workshops area it proved difficult to hear the speakers unless you had the receptor in a specific position, which was a bit confusing in the beginning and a bit hard to find a spot, but we managed. The workshops varied a lot between medium and hard difficulties. We found it difficult to complete the workshops as they required custom settings to be enabled on the machine, packages to be installed and fighting with some bugs and errors. Nevertheless we finished a very nice workshop about automating your Docker image build on Dockerhub through Github. What this means is that you can trigger a Docker image building event every time you do a commit with a special tag or on a special branch on Github. This saves a lot of time when building a new image, easy as doing a git tag and a git push origin remote, pretty nice.
We then went to give a try to the second workshops and by the middle of the second workshop we decided to stop to continue listening properly to the talks and continue the workshops as homework, so this is an extra goody from the conference for those willing to get their hands dirty with Docker and all the services around them.
While we were doing the workshops there were two talks given.
One by Nicola Kabar, a CCIE engineer at Docker, who gave an overview on how the new world of Docker multihost networking is working and he showed a few examples. Long story short, it is now possible to create overlay networks that span between different physical Docker hosts and do easier services discovery among different physical hosts and locations. One of the best additions to Docker 1.9 as well as the most needed one.
The next talk was given by Armin Coralic, software engineer at Xebia, explaining you can “dockerize” your development workstation by doing a full stack Docker image. This means that they are building one Docker image with all the required software for development for their developers. An interesting talk where we got some points we might apply at Elements.
One of the talks that made us all very curious and that will definitely make us to give a further try, is the talk given by Kelsey Hightower, a Google Engineer, about Docker Swarm and Kubernetes. He described and demonstrated how Kubernetes can be used to describe your infrastructure and do deployments on any cloud system. We were all amazed by the simplicity and way that you can describe and code your infrastructure in order to launch a complete stack of applications. He also showed us how you can recover from a deletion of a Docker image running MySQL in an automated way by using Kubernetes and the possibility to do a rolling update on your images with barely no downtime. One word about this talk: Awesome.
Next in line was a talk by Michiel Sens, solution architect at Xebia, about pipeline automation using Vagrant, Ansible, Docker, Swarm, Consul and Jenkins. The talk gave us another good set of ideas and ways how to use different solutions and architectures to enable the development teams to be more agile and deliver and deploy software faster, I took some nice notes from this talk.
Next the Elements team went to stretch their legs and recover of so much incoming information from the talks, as the talk that was going on was not interesting for us at all as we are not thinking on running ASP.net in Docker.
The next talk was given by Casey Bisson from Joyent and demoed and explained how you can run Mesos to deploy and run Docker on Bare Metal and the whole advantage on running Docker straight from the Bare Metal, pretty nifty stuff!
Following this talk was Benny Cornelissen, an IT architect at Xebia, with quite a confusing talk on how Terraform can be used to deploy to any cloud system. We took our notes and will look further into this solution as it looks like it has a nice declarative way in order to create a cluster of Docker containers.
Last but not the least, a talk by Armon Dadgar on which he dove in detail on the workload scheduler Nomad. We were also quite impressed with the level of detail of this talk and left us curious on how could we make use of Nomad at Elements.
All in all was an excellent conference with very positive points for us as we came home with a bit of extra luggage of knowledge. The general feeling was that we got to know a lot of different tools and approaches to reach the same end and we are looking forward to Dutch Docker Day in 2016 already!
Originally published at www.elements.nl on November 23, 2015.
