Earlier this summer, Docker presented at Cloud Field Day 1 (CFD1) on some of their current technology and upcoming enhancements. (See the video’s here).
As you probably recall, Docker is an implementation of Linux containers which is a way of packaging applications into micro-services that can be built, ship and run across onprem, private and public cloud infrastructure.
Docker containers and Docker Engine
Docker containers combine a base OS image, plus whatever other binaries are needed to run a micro-service into a container which runs ontop of a Docker Engine. Containers can then be run as a single instance or multiple instances on a Docker Engine.
Containers are not VMs, they have a fundamentally different architecture. For instance,
- A VM includes a full OS and App software, it often takes several minutes to boot up and there is a hypervisor underneath it that emulates hardware and other critical services needed to run a VM. But there is no underlying standard OS under the VM layer.
- A Docker container relies on shared OS resources, which allows for a lighter weight application package using shared resources, which means that instantiation/booting up is much faster, there is no Hypervisor, but a container can run under Linux, Windows or Mac OSs, and containers provide for full stack portability.
In the Docker Hub (srepository for Docker containers) one can find a WordPress container that contains the whole LAMP + WordPress stack in a single container. To run WordPress you would also need a MySQL or compatible database and there’s a MySQL machine container that can be used. You could easily run both the WordPress/LAMP container and the MySQL container in the same Docker Engine, connect the two together and connect the LAMP+Wordpress container to the Internet to fire up a WordPress blog site.
Docker compared VMs to houses and containers to apartments. Docker Engines can run as a VM or on bare metal hardware.
Running Docker containers on desktop, servers and in the cloud
If you want to experiment with Docker, you can download Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows which can be used install and run a native Docker engine on your desktop.
Windows Server also supports native Docker containers. In VMware one can run Docker containers under vSphere Integrated Containers which supplies Docker API endpoints as standard ESX VMs or you can run Docker containers under Project Photon which is a streamlined, non-ESX hypervisor that also supplies Docker API endpoints.
You can run Docker containers in AWS and Azure as well that integrates with each public cloud’s compute, network and storage services.
Docker Swarm
So you have your Docker engine running, with multiple containers sharing resources and to create an application but your out of compute, storage or networking power on your engine and need to bring on another server or two. What do you do? With Docker 1.12, you can now use Docker Swarm, which supports multiple Docker Engines.
With Docker Swarm, you have management nodes and worker nodes. Management nodes provide HA services for Docker containers which runs across multiple worker nodes. Worker nodes run Docker Engines with multiple containers.
Docker Swarms orchestrates the operation of multiple Docker Engines running Docker Services.
A Docker Service is a Docker container running across multiple worker nodes (engines) in a Docker Swarm. Docker services can be run globally (across each worker node) or replicated (some number of Docker Container instances are run across one or more worker nodes). You specify on the Docker Service command which you want and Swarm will insure that the specifications selected are implemented across its worker nodes.
If a worker node goes down, Swarm will detect it and re-start the failed container instances on other worker nodes in the Swarm. Beware, if your container relied on persistent storage, that storage must be also available to all Swarm worker nodes.
Swarm provides a Routing Mesh. When you fire up a container service you can identify a swarm-wide ingress port for a container. Every worker node will listen in on that port to provide a container-aware routing service to route app requests across the Swarm to wherever the containers are currently running.
You can have multiple Swarm management nodes which share the management of the Swarm. Swarm management nodes are either leaders or followers and provide a RAFT consensus model. If the leader node goes down, another management node will take on its leadership role and start managing the Swarm.
There are many other technologies underneath Docker Swarm that are worth a look but suffice it to say it provides a load-balancing, HA service for container execution across multiple engines.
Docker Datacenter
What could possibly be missing? We have Docker Engines that can run multiple containers and Docker Swarms that can run multiple Docker Engines and containers in an HA manner. But we really need something that supports multiple Docker Swarms, and throw in a private secure Container repository and enterprise support options while you’re at it.
Earlier this year Docker introduced Docker Datacenter, a priced service offering which does just that. It provides Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) across multiple Docker Swarms that has commercial support options, a Docker Trusted Repository and integrates it all with enterprise services like LDAP/AD to provide audit logs and other monitoring capabilities for container services execution.
Using Docker Datacenter, developers can have their own multiple development swarms to support engineering activities and ship and store their container images in a secure, private repository and operations can have multiple Swarms which all run the same Docker Container apps in an HA manner.
From an app developer standpoint, it all looks like container instances are running in the same Docker Engine environment across all those implementations. Operations sees a centralized management console (plane) that provides a way to monitor and manage multiple Docker Swarms running everywhere.
Well that’s about it for the update on Docker. There wasn’t much at the sessions on how containers access persistent storage but there’s a Flocker service that offers plugin support for EMC, NetApp and other enterprise SAN storage for Container apps. And there seem to be others out there and available.
You can read/hear more about Docker from these other CFD1 participants:
- The point of Docker is more than containers by Justin Warren (@JPWarren)
- Docker on Cloudcast (podcast) by Nigel Moulton (@NigelPoulton)
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Full disclosure: Docker gave us a very nice/very long scarf, and two t-shirts decorated with Docker logo and tagline and a number of stickers and pins.
