The Revolution Will Be

Credits

The @docker presentation to beat is https://github.com/jbarratt/dockertalk …. Thanks @jbarratt for looking past the buzz and doing our work justice. -- Solomon Hykes

In the beginning, there was the computer

What do we need to share?

  1. Resources: We all get enough (but not too much)
  2. Security/Privacy: We stay out of each other's stuff
  3. Dependencies: Apps & Libs I need

Many Strategies

Impacts

Virtuozzo/OpenVZ ("Thick Containers")

Density/Efficiency: We should care.

  1. Profit
    • Extra servers, networking gear
    • Power Costs
  2. Performance
    • See (1)
  3. Social and Environmental Responsibility
    • Power usage = C02
    • Shipping = C02
    • Manufacturing = Precious Metals, Toxic Waste
    • Also, can be terrible working conditions.

On Power

TL;DR Today's Cloud Might Need Improvement

Apps & Server Layer

How do we ship our applications?

A Hypothetical Python App

  1. We need python 3.2. Damn, distro doesn't provide it.
  2. Need a library that clashes with the system's version. Damn.
  3. We package the whole mess, using virtualenv and some glue.
  4. Oh, and we need redis 2.6 for Lua support. Distro has 2.4. Triple damn.
  5. Oh, and the QA team has standardized on Centos.
  6. Oh, BTW, the new search service is a node.js app, that's cool, right?

Netflix Model

  • Bake an entire server image
  • Test as a unit
  • Use for deploy and rollback

Progress! But, 'the computer' is a very chunky unit of abstraction.

The Tricky Bits

  • Lots of sysadmin surface area
  • Additional Daemons to run & manage
  • Large images to juggle. 1 byte change? 0.5 GB image.
  • Boot Times. 2 seconds - 15 mins (OpenStack nodepool)
  • Density isn't great.

What about PaaS?

Cool! "Process Virtualization Not Server Virtualization."

Sort of.

  • Local dev, QA, staging can be tough to clone their versions of.
  • Hard upper bound on troubleshooting
  • Generally fixed userland
  • Lots of capability limits (daemons, storage, networking, etc)

DREAM WITH ME

What is Docker?

“Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application.”

What is Docker?

What is Docker?

Portability & Density

  • Extremely Lightweight
  • Build containers manually or with many flavors of repeatable process
  • Run those on local, dev, QA, stage, prod, cloud, PaaS...

Who is Docker?

Tons of people!

  • Open Sourced by dotCloud, part of a family of other great tools. (hipache)
  • < 1 year old, but hundreds of committers, and it's blogged about constantly
  • Quick Survey?

Ecosystem:

Huge and Growing.

Not Just Docker

  • LXC vanilla // OpenStack
  • CloudLinux
  • lmctfy

But Docker is Crazy.

  • PaaS: Cocaine (!!!!), dotCloud, Deis, OpenShift, Flynn, Dokku..
  • IaaS: OpenStack (Standard in Havana)
  • VPS: Many/Most providers possible if not easy (Linode, DO)
  • Distros: CoreOS
  • Config Management: Puppet, Chef, Salt, Ansible
  • Orchestration: Heat, Maestro, Mesos, Toscanni
  • Dashboards: Docker-UI, Shipyard, Horizon

Security

  • Pretty tested stuff
  • Ubuntu ships with extra hardening (AppArmor vs /proc/sys*)
  • Can be layered (e.g. OpenShift, SELinux)
  • Lower priv mode coming soon
  • Docker Index, Handle With Care. (Build Dockerfiles)

How do I play?


                    curl http://get.docker.io | sudo sh

Or


# Install vagrant, then...
$ git clone https://github.com/dotcloud/docker.git
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
$ sudo docker

Should I do more than play?

  • Not rated as "production ready" due to API volatility
  • Very usable for nearline applications (e.g. testing)

Let's Get Our Hands Dirty