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It’s hard not to see DockerCon2014 as anything other than a resounding success. Over five-hundred operations engineers, kernel hackers, systems geeks, and various “guardians of the NOC” attended — including a large number of folks who personally pitched in to make this one of the hottest events of the year.
The venue was filled to capacity, with another four-hundred hopeful hackers joining the wait-list. If it wasn’t for the prizes offered at the DockerCon hackathon, I wouldn’t have been able to get in. Thankfully, Frederick Kautz and I placed second with with our mashup, gist-reveal.it, scoring our tickets to the main event.
Even at this early stage, some are already making claims that containers might just save the world. While “world saving” might be a stretch, DockerCon was a revolutionary event in many ways for the open source community. This is why I’m proud to present these highlights, along with an overview of Red Hat’s contributions, from DockerCon 2014:
#DockerCon2014 – Day 1
Ben Golub, Docker’s CEO, provided the opening keynote address on day one, announcing the release of Docker 1.0.
This 1.0 launch marks the first officially production-ready release of the Docker Engine, and a major milestone in the evolution of Linux container technology. A few notable features include: security enhancements, support for working with physical devices, and the ability to pause and unpause a container environment.
He also shared information about Docker Inc’s revenue model, which follows a familiar open source approach of offering support, training, and consulting services for enterprise IT environments.
DockerHub
The Docker Index was replaced by the newly-launched DockerHub, and is quickly becoming a one-stop shop for the greater Linux community.
The DockerHub upgrade includes support for “official repositories“, making it easier to find recent builds of your favorite Linux services and OS distributions, each packaged up by their respective open source project maintainers.
Developers are encouraged to compose new solutions by stitching basic service dependencies together using container orchestration tools. There’s an example of this technique in the next section.
Red Hat Keynote
Red Hat’s CTO, Brian Stevens, also provided a keynote address on the opening day. He began with a nice historical retrospective of the evolution of Linux kernel services, while highlighting many of Red Hat’s contributions along the way.
Red Hat’s latest Linux distributions all include first-class support for Docker containers. RHEL 7 and Project Atomic both take advantage of systemd and GearD as core components of this new platform design.
OpenShift’s own Steve Citron-Pousty provided a live demo of our latest work, showing how to use geard to establish network connections between container environments. The video also shows how basic application scaling can be accomplished using the same tools.
#DockerCon2014 – Day 2
Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker Inc, opened up the second day of the conference with his own keynote address. He introduced three new open source projects for working with Docker that help establish a clear a path for future development:
Libcontainer provides a standardized interface for OS sandboxing. It uses SELinux, CGroups, and kernel namespaces to deliver secure container environments that are easy to manage, without mucking up the host system.
Libchan is a lightweight communication protocol that provides a basic messaging system for distributed computing, supporting a variety of transports (Unix sockets, TCP, TLS, SPDY).
Finally, there is libswarm – a standard interface for composing complex, multi-container solutions, and for managing the networking links between these clustered environments. An adapter is already available for using libswarm to talk to Red Hat’s geard service (in addition to several other container orchestration tools).
Docker Security
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Dan Walsh provided a great presenation on Docker Security, covering many of the safeguards that go into making this latest release secure enough for production use.
Later in the conference, Dan Walsh was announced as an appointed member of Docker’s inaugural advisory board – Congratulations, Dan!
True innovation happens on Open Platforms
Now, more than ever, it’s clear that the future is open. Although OpenShift has been container-focused for years, the addition of a Docker-based container model helps ensure your solutions can run as expected on any Docker-ready platform.
Congratulations to everyone at Docker Inc, and to the larger Docker community. And, “Thank You!” to everyone who pitched in to make DockerCon such a huge success!
Next Steps
- Try Docker
- Learn more about the GearD container orchestration tool
- Dig into Red Hat’s container-focused OS, Project Atomic
- Stay tuned to the OpenShift Blog for more great information on Docker.
- Additional information about Red Hat & Docker is available on the OpenShift Origin blog
The post DockerCon 2014: a Red Hat Recap appeared first on Platform as a Service Magazine.