Docker Con Europe 2017 - A recap

Welcome 🙂

Being an Docker Campus Ambassador, I got the oppurtunity to visit Docker Con Europe 2017 - which was an awesome experience which I want to share here. As it has been quite some time since I've been to a bigger conference - and this trip does not only include visiting Docker Con - I am going to seperate this blog into two sections.

First, I am going to go for the main take-aways, which should have been posted everywhere in the net already. Secondly, I'm going to go through the whole story and add some pictures of the beautiful city of Copenhagen.

So lets get started 🙂

 

1.) Take aways

Modernize Traditional Apps (MTA)

Docker has found itself a new usecase: Use Docker to deploy legacy apps in your DevOps enabled workflow. Docker does present tools for that during its keynote, like the Docker Application Converter. However, these tools are not given out to users and only work in the specific field of Tomcat Java Web Apps or IIS Web Apps with .NET. The only way to get your apps converted in a professional way, is to buy Docker Enterprise Edition and get a Docker Partner like Avanade or Amazic over to your premises and do the work for you. So it is not magic, but hard work to convert your old apps. More infos here.

Docker with Swarm and Kubernetes

Docker is going to include Swarm and Kubernetes in the future - side by side - which is awesome. However, the reason behind that might not tbe that Docker wants to do something for its users, but more for Google: In the past it was looking like Google is going to seperated from Docker and doing its own thing. So embracing Google and Kubernetes might be the thing that keeps Google from running away - and leading the pack away from Docker. I personally think that after some iterations, Swarm and Kubernetes might disappear and lead way to another tool, which consists of parts of Swarm and Kubernetes. You might want to buy KubeSwarm.com today? 😉 Oh, and if you want to join the adventure early: beta.docker.com will get you started.

Docker Certified Associate

There is a official Docker Certification available now, which can be found here. Due to beeing a Beta Tester, I was already in that program - however, the first experience was kind of rough, which should be corrected by now to a more pleasent one. To get you started, we prepared a little DCA Prep Guide on Github. PRs are very welcome!

ARM (IoT) - Resin

Finally I got to meet up with the nice guys and girl of resin.io - if you're a regular on my blog, you might have seen a load of different articles and videos about their Infrastructure platform for IoT, as well as their OS resinOS for IoT applications. Basically: They get Docker running on Raspberry Pi and similiar platforms. And they also created balena, which I already talked about in this post.

ARM (Server) - Qualcomm

DockerCon is a Software Convention by design, so vendors like Cisco had a hard job getting to people. But the hardest job among all, had Chandni Chandran and Elsie Wahlig from Qualcomm. They actually showcased the coolest piece of hardware of the overall convention (just fighting with the bleeding-edge new specialized Prototype Raspberry Pi from resin ;)) - the Qualcomm Centriq 2400 - a 48 core ARMv8 CPU - ready for datacenter usage - and yes, it does run Linuxkit! Meeting Chandni, the Product Manager for this Server Series, and Elsie, the Director of Product Management for Datacenter Technologies was a huge honor, as well as it was a blast for an ARM fanboy as I am ^^'. The cool thing about their technology is, that it might come soon to packet.net (which I did review sometime ago) - so, lets get our fingers crossed that this beautiful and awesome machine finds its way into the racks of every major hoster - and maybe onto my table 😉 [Hey, it is as cool as you could *really use it* without building a server closet around it - and.. for the other insane path - dreaming is allowed, ain't it? :3]

Monitoring

Felt like the "hot-*hit" of this Docker Con: Nearly everyone was holding up a product in that area. Be it DataDog, sysdig or Instana. However, as some booth-visitors pointed out - some of these products, like DataDog, only exist in a SaaS solution and cannot be used on-prem. Quite the security breach you got there... I would go with Instana.

Security Solutions

CyberArk, BlackDuck, Aqua Security, Twistlock and cilium - among others. I would vote for cilium, as they do Open Source.

Storage

StorageOS, Virtuozzo Storage, elastfile, NetApp, Zenko CloudServer where the main players, however, next to the raw storage, also storage adapters were available like the Zenko Multi Cloud Connector or the ever famous RexRay - it seems like quite a trend to go more and more to Amazon S3 compatible interfaces. For reference I linked only vendors which had Community Editions or Open Source Software available ;).

Virtualization

VMware, Cisco, IBM, Nutanix. Well, that was a surprise. While VMware stays on track with its vSphere Integrated Containers 1.2, Cisco trys to wrap up Docker in its UCS and Flexpod series via RedHat. IBM starts up with its IBM Cloud Private - which even comes in a Community Edition - and seems interesting. Same goes for Nutanix Community Edition which can be checked out here.

Misc

Somehow everyone seems to go out for an Enterprise Edition now: Create.io, Redis Enterprise and nginx+ (Load Balancer). But somehow, some of these corporations deserve special treatment: nginx+ is all about trust, as you get your binaries delivered without "call-home" - which is a nice thing and I would love to see this being the "norm" again. Other than that, jFrog was there with awesome coffee and lovely designed shirts, as well as Atlassian and other DevOps tool makers like Puppet, Chef and Rancher. Also - Microsoft, Amazon and Google had their booths as well but... well, that was kind of a must, so ;).

 

2.) The whole story

Well, now that we got through this, we might add some images to complete the overall picture ;)!

Flight from Luxemburg to Zurich

Just short before Zurich

Zurich Airport - here I got information that resins new Moby Clone balena had been released. So I just grabbed the next Wifi Connection, downloaded all files - and went back into the air - next stop: Copenhagen!

Zurich from above

balena Experiments in Flight

... and working!

Arrived in the heart of Copenhagen

My sleeping and dev place for the next days to come 😉

Skt Alban Church

Kastellet

Kastellet

Kastellet

Kastellet

Kastellet

Harbour

The little Mermaid

Amalienborg Palace

Nyhavn

Nyhavn

Nyhavn

North Atlantic House

Folketheatret

Bicycles

Soylent Green - anyone?

Food - some assembly required

Chili from Berlin, Wine from Trier and Water from Copenhagen - does taste awesome

Working on the JCTixx v2 Portable Scanner Type M / Munin

Crew on board!

Bella Center on Monday, fist Docker Day!

Already a cool start

On Monady, we got to attend the Community Leaders Summit. We finally got to meet a big part of the Community Leaders familiy, Meetup Organizers from all over the world - and other Campus Ambassadors, which was awesome. I finally got to meet Karen Bajza, Bret Fisher, Jean-Marc Meessen and Jens Doose, which was really cool :).

The obligatory picture with the floating Moby on Day 2 was even an event on which one was awarded a special pin.

Breakfast was awesome, I loved those pancakes...

... and did I mention we got a load of coffee everywhere around the Bella Center? During all that time, I could meet up with Xinity, Gildas Cuisinier, Oliver Robert and Xiaowen - waiting eagerly for the keynote.

The first Keynote was one of the biggest events

... and Modernize Traditional Apps (MTA) was the big buzzword for the days to come...

... I could not help but start hacking around with image2docker during the keynote... The results were mixed.

#dinoselfie - with Michael Irwin!

resin.io's beautiful new custom Raspberry PI Board...

..with some awesome features!

Cisco is also commited to Containers

... and jFrog had some awesome designs

OpenFAAS with Alex Ellis

Qualcomm Centriq 2400

Qualcomm Centriq 2400 - thats what I call hands-on!

Docker Party at the second evening...

...in an old train hall...

...with lots of space...

... and games!

Tivoli park 🙂

Bella Center in the morning of Day 3

The famous jFrog Universal Coffee Registry

... and the even more famous resin.io Demo -
with a Raspberry Pi - running resin.io - in resin 😉

Working on balena demos at the resin booth

Working on balena demos at the resin booth

Lunch was awesome, too 😉

I finally meet Chanwit Kaewkasi during a Hallway Track and as he is a fellow ARM fan - I could not help but bring him to the Qualcomm booth to get him some demotime - I think I liked it ;).

Elsie and Chandni are demo-ing LinuxKit on their new Qualcomm System

A last selfie with Karen 🙂

And I needed to pay the container bath a visit - on the Hallway Track

Leaving Kopenhagen on Day 4 - and last thing I see...

... is a container ship. Well. Ain't going to get more Dockerized than that ;)!

I was very lucky and attended the MTA Pin Challenge - during that I bumped into Mano Marks - finished the Challenge as first one, and got an custom WASD Keyboard with some nice finish. Nick Harvey found out about that - and my new job - and completely went bananas - as he figured out that this keyboard might soon receive code which could go to space... Well... Let's hope so ;).

And with that, I conclude my little Docker Con recap. I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did - there are certainly interesting times ahead ;)!

PS: I heared the recorded videos are online now :3

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