Containers

2015 is coming to a close and it’s always fun to reflect on all that has changed, grown, and news that almost make you wonder if pigs can now fly. Our team has greatly expanded, the community is growing, we are now accepting content contributors from around the world...so much to pick from. As you can tell it’s been a busy year and here are just some of top highlights. Here we go and in no particular order: 1) A...

Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) 2.0 brings Perl 5.20 as a Docker image. This allows you to deploy Perl applications easily. The basic idea is to combine your application code from Git tree and Red Hat's rhscl/perl-520-rhel7 base image into an application image that will run your application in mod_perl environment. Your application can either be a simple Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script or a full-fledged Perl Web Server Gateway Interface (PSGI) application. Following this step-by-step procedure will show you...

In Architecting Containers Part 1 we explored the difference between the user space and kernel space. In Architecting Containers Part 2 we explored why the user space matters to developers, administrators, and architects. In today’s post we will highlight a handful of important ways the choice of the user space can affect application deployment and maintenance. While there are many ways for a given container architecture to affect and/or influence your application, the user space provides tooling that is often...

New RHSCL-based Docker images that are now in beta let you easily build your own application containers even without writing any Dockerfiles. Here is an example of a Ruby on Rails application built with the Ruby 2.2 image using the PostgreSQL 9.4 image as a database backend. For building the application image we will use a tool called source-to-image (s2i, formally sti) which is a program that can build your application image on top of s2i images. For example the...

OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat was designed to be application architecture agnostic. In addition to running traditional stateful and/or legacy-type workloads, OpenShift Enterprise seamlessly provides support for modern, stateless Twelve-Factor applications. This document provides a guide on how to optimize the architecture and deployment of your Twelve-Factor applications on OpenShift Enterprise. Note: The Twelve-Factor app is a methodology for building apps in modern cloud environments. Read more at http://12factor.net/. Factor Relationship Codebase One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys...

“As a part of the Red Hat Software Collections offering, Red Hat provides a number of container images, which are based on the corresponding Software Collections. These include application, daemon, and database images. The provided images, currently available in the Beta version” (for more information see https://access.redhat.com/articles/1752723) Red Hat Software Collections allows you to run newer versions of software on a stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These new images combine this feature with the benefits of containers. In this post...

I'm very happy to announce that Docker images based on collections from Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) 2.0 are in beta testing. The images are available from the Red Hat Container Registry, and we've got the set of collections for language, databases and web servers covered - a complete list is below. If you've not tried out the Docker package from RHEL7 Extras, you need to enable the Extras channel, install the docker page, and start the docker service; an...

Background I’ve been working with the CTO of a online video game company to develop a container architecture for his business. The goal is to simplify the deployment of new applications as well as make it easier to go back and change code on older applications. The desired state is environmental parity across the infrastructure -- this will simplify the assignment of work on different applications to different developers. From developer laptops to production servers, the code will just work...

In Architecting Containers Part 1 we explored the difference between user space and kernel space. In this post, we will continue by exploring why the user space matters to developers, administrators, and architects. From a functional perspective, we will explore the connection that both ISV applications and in-house application development have to the user space. Read the entire article: Architecting Containers Part 2: Why the User Space Matters | Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog

This is a guest post written by Red Hat's own Gunnar Hellekson. I tend to pay attention to what Gunnar has to say and recommend the same. "There are three big challenges that lay between containers-as-toy and containers-as-infrastructure: Containers demand a lot more automation than you have now. Containers make you an operating system vendor. Containers drive organizational changes." Source: Red Hat: Containers for Grown-Ups - Tools Advisor

A number of Red Hatters are attending this week's NodeConf.eu as one of the event sponsors, but we're also here to learn more about Node.js and listen to some great sessions. Plus, I've met probably a dozen Red Hatters for the first time - most of whom are part of the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform team (formerly FeedHenry). Another nice benefit for this event is that it's in Waterford, Ireland, and specifically at Waterford Castle (TRULY - this is...

So here's are deal: We've created what we're calling "PaaS-Containers" in our IT production environment. It consists of core technologies like RHEL Atomic Host, Kubernetes, and Docker along with supporting CI/CD components like Jenkins together as part of an offering that supports the end-to-end automated deployments of applications from a code-commit event through automated testing and roll-out through multiple environments (dev, QA, stage, prod). Oh, did I mention that it's also integrated with our enterprise logging and monitoring as well...

Are you getting into architecting for containers? Here's a repost of my article on rhelblog.redhat.com. Perhaps you’ve been charged with developing a container-based application infrastructure? If yes, you most likely understand the value that containers can provide to your developers, architects, and operations team. In fact, you’ve likely been reading up on containers and are excited about exploring the technology in more detail. However, before diving head-first into a discussion about the architecture and deployment of containers in a production...

What are user namespaces? Sticking with the apartment complex analogy, the numbering of users and groups have historically been the same in every container and in the underlying host, just like public channel 10 is generally the same in every unit in an apartment building. But, imagine that people in different apartments are getting their television signal from different cable and satellite companies. Channel 10 is now different for each person. It might be sports for one person, and news...

Fresh from Red Hat Summit, Lars Herrmann, who is responsible for Red Hat's container strategy, shares Red Hat's container strategy at during this Red Hat Summit 2015 session: https://youtu.be/J3d8tf_Fcvg Lars does a great job explaining: the value of containers and further explains them with "the most interesting application in the world" the consistency across traditional and cloud-ready applications application portability linkages to IaaS and PaaS the roles of container certification and registries more...

From the buzz on Twitter and blog posts, you could feel that ECMAScript 6 was finally coming. It has many things we’ve wanted for years, so it makes sense to start new projects with it in mind. ECMAScript 6 Others have written in depth about various ECMAScript 6 features. I’d like to focus just on one: module loading. There is no common way to load your ES6 modules natively in the browsers. For example babel, has support for three different...

As part of our participation in hundreds of open source communities, Red Hat engineers are often involved in research and development efforts that may or may not become a part of Red Hat's supported offerings. Intel's Data-plane Development Kit (DPDK) is a set of libraries and drivers for Linux and BSD built for fast packet processing, for the burgeoning " Network Function Virtualization", or NFV discipline. Typical verticals interested in turning Linux boxes into packet-processing machines are telecom, financial services...

Imagine this: deploy an application from code-commit to qa, validate through automated testing, and then push the same image into production with no manual intervention, no outage, no configuration changes, and with full audibility through change records. A month-and-a-half ago, we formed a tiger team and gave them less than 90 days to do it. How? Build an end-to-end CI/CD environment leveraging RHEL Atomic 7.1 as the core platform and integrating with key technologies like git, Jenkins, packer.io, in a...

Linux Containers combine well-established Linux kernel technologies such as namespaces, SELinux, cgroups and iptables with incredible ease of use and exceptional performance. For customers looking for the lowest possible network latencies and reduced CPU overhead coupled with the deployment advantages of Linux containers, Red Hat's new Accelerating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7-based Linux Containers with Solarflare OpenOnload whitepaper provides installation, configuration and tuning guidance for Docker containers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Solarflare OpenOnload network acceleration. The whitepaper...

Dan Walsh wrote this great article for opensource.com. I've recently learned from Dan that SELinux and containers are excellent complements to each other - kind of like tea and scones, peanut butter and jelly, Laurel and Hardy. (Which one of these did you need to google?) As container applications become finer grained, SELinux becomes really easy to use (for both dev and ops) for securing containers. Here's an excerpt from Dan's article - click through to read the whole thing...

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Bhavna Sarathy of Red Hat. Over the last 18 months, especially since the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, “containers” have emerged as a hot topic. With the more recent introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host, an operating system optimized for running the next generation of applications with Linux containers, one might wonder… what about virtualization? In that the benefits of containerization seem to overlap those of traditional virtualization, how...

Here are excerpts from today's announcement - an ecosystem with container development tools to containerize and certify applications: "Red Hat today announced the launch of the first certified, end-to-end ecosystem program for Linux containers based on Docker, a key component of the company’s vision for containerized applications unveiled in March 2014. Leveraging Red Hat’s vast network of thousands of partners and independent software vendors (ISVs), this ecosystem program is designed to enable the design, development and delivery of certified, trusted...