Today you would have to be under an IT rock if you haven’t at least heard of containers. Containers, which have recently been made easily usable by a wide audience, allow applications to flow in a uniform package from development, to test, to production. Containers also allow applications to be moved between public and private clouds as well as bare metal environments. All of this increases agility and reduces friction in the overall development to deployment cycle, increasing the speed that organizations can deliver services to customers.
The 800 pound gorilla in the space is Docker which makes the most widely used container format and is building out additional offerings in the greater container ecosystem.
DockerCon
Last week in Seattle Docker held DockerCon 2016, its fourth conference promoting the general container ecosystem. The event featured dozens of participating companies as well as a plethora of talks. There was a ton of energy and the event even included a “full on kitty laser death match” on the main stage:
I attended the show and while there I attended sessions, conducted a bunch of interviews (see below) and spent time working at the Dell booth supporting Dell’s presence.
Dell Booth
At our booth we showed off four major offerings/projects in the Docker and container 
space (here’s a video I did giving a brief overview what we were featuring).
We showed:
- BlueData configuration guide: BlueData’s platform provides customers with Big Data as a service, giving them the ability to leverage one pool of storage across multiple versions and distributions of big data tools. The platform leverages Docker to deliver bare-metal performance with the flexibility of virtualization. The configuration guide details the configuration set-up for BlueData’s Big-Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platform on Dell’s PowerEdge Servers.
- Developer laptops: In the booth we showed off our line of Ubuntu-based developer laptops (Project Sputnik). These Linux-based systems provide a native platform for Docker-based development and allows developers to push their container-based apps to the cloud. On the second day we gave away a “Sputnik” laptop (see below for the crowd on hand for the drawing).
- Flocker plugin: This plugin allows ClusterHQ’s Flocker to integrate with the Dell Storage SC Series. This allows developer and operations teams to use existing storage to create portable container-level storage for Docker.
- Docker Swarm plugin: This plugin, which is in the proof of concept phase, connects Docker Swarm with Dell’s next gen networking operating system, OS10. The plugin automates configuration of vlan & routers for Docker’s Macvlan/Ipvlan driver orchestrated using Docker Swarm.
All in all a great show, helping to raise Dell’s presence in the space and providing us with greater insight into customer needs and the ecosystem evolution.
Waiting in front of the Dell booth for the Sputnik drawing
Video interviews:
- Talking with Rancher’s Chief Architect
- EMC’s hyperconverged VxRack – An overview
- EMC {code}’s REX-Ray and RackHD projects
- VMware’s Photon platform and cloud native apps
- Learning about vSphere Integrated Containers
- Why DevOps needs composability, not integrated stacks
Extra-credit reading
- Reference Configuration for BlueData on PowerEdge Servers
- Flocker plugin for Dell storage up on GitHub
- Ubuntu-based developer laptops
- DockerCon video playlist
Pau for now…
Posted by Barton George 
Barton's Blog 