DockerCon 2016 takeaways
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Three years and three months ago, Docker launched to the public. And this year, more than 4,000 developers and IT ops professionals attended DockerCon 2016 in Seattle.
I personally found it to be one of the highest quality conferences I’ve been to. Every session I attended gave me something to think about. However, the biggest announcements came during the keynote, specifically, Docker Engine for Mac and Windows, deployment to Microsoft Azure and AWS, built-in orchestration and the Docker store (a marketplace).
Docker Engine for Mac and Windows
I tried Docker the day it was initially released for Linux in 2013. But if you’re like me and develop software on a Mac or Windows machine, running Docker required that you first run a Linux virtual machine.
Not any more! The Mac client is technically beta, but word on the street is that it’s quite reliable already, and boots in seconds. A dozen members of the Pluralsight engineering team attended the conference as well, and one of our most proficient devs installed the beta and successfully started running an app while following along with a live demo.
The Windows version is also ready to try. You’ll need to be running Windows 10 Pro in order to use it today, but other versions will be supported eventually.
These engines aren’t partial implementations, either. They support the full feature set of Docker 1.12, including the new distributed application bundles.
Docker Azure and AWS beta
For IT ops professionals who find it uninspiring to run software on only a single machine, Docker for AWS and Azure allows you to easily deploy and scale Docker containers (and full distributed setups) to the cloud.
Like the developer-targeted engines, Docker for AWS and Azure have all the features of Docker 1.12 and will be maintained on the same schedule as all the other Docker Engines.
Docker built-in orchestration
New orchestration features make it easy to define services and scale them up or down. Need 100 Nginx web servers? Docker 1.12 can do that now.
I think the automatic security features are especially interesting. In order to guard against compromised TLS certificates, Docker can automatically cycle the certificates used by individual containers, as often as every 30 minutes!
Docker app bundle
Orchestration is useful for single containers, but it’s even more useful with Docker distributed app bundles, which can define a group of containers. You can define a web server, app server, database and cache server, then deploy and run them together for development, testing, staging or production.
Docker app store
Finally, there’s a new marketplace for selling and buying Docker containers. Pricing and royalty details are forthcoming, but many companies have already signed on and will be selling authorized containers in the official Docker store.
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