Thousands of Containers, Millions of Containers: Towards Sufficiency of Infrastructure Components

In this week's LinuxONE announcement, containers are mentioned a couple of times. Docker has been used as underlying infrastructure for some of the announcement's demo workloads, and when implementing such a new project, microservices and containers seem a natural deployment paradigm choice. Further sound bites are about scaling over the number of Docker containers on LinuxONE, so what is behind that? For those who know me personally, you've got to watch the video. They made me wear a *black* T-Shirt, can you image!

Portus

As an extension to distribution/registry, SUSE has created an open source project called Portus. Portus comes offers a web UI and good control over users and teams dealing with images in a registry.

SLES12 officially supports Docker

Since end of 2015, SUSE also provides Docker on z through their "containers module" on top of SLES 12 (SP1). This makes SUSE the first one of the big enterprise distributions to support Docker on z Systems commercially. The package also contains base images for conveniently starting. Having decoupled Docker from the SLES 12 base vehicle through a module is a goodness, this allows for independent updates on a potentially higher frequency.

Latest Docker level available for Linux on z Systems

The Docker on z anchor page on developerWorks has been updated for the latest Docker binaries: version 1.9.1 is available now for Linux on z.
Please note you could run into issue 16256, at least we have seen some occurrences. A workaround for that is to start the daemon with the parameter "--exec-opt native.cgroupdriver=cgroupfs".

Fedora now comes with Docker

Earlier this month, Fedora 23 has been announced for z Systems. Note it comes with Docker packages (e.g. docker-1.7.0-22.gitdcff4e1.fc23.s390x.rpm in the download directory).

DockerCon EU

Should you be at DockerCon Europe 2015 in Barcelona, don't miss to stop by at the IBM booth. I will be there, too (for a cool 10,000 containers demo that the Linux on Power folks prepared, but if you start talking about z Systems, I will of course not stop the discussion).
See you there...

Another Base Image for Docker on z Systems: ClefOS

Neale Ferguson from Sine Nomine Associates has uploaded another base image: ClefOS. ClefOS is technically a CentOS port to z Systems, but since it is not a part of the CentOS organization, it's called ClefOS. The image is brunswickheads/clefos71-base-s390x (available tags listed here), so

docker pull brunswickheads/clefos71-base-s390x

will get you the image. It is yum-enabled, so you can easily install additional packages.

The user page https://hub.docker.com/u/brunswickheads/ provides a pile of nice images on top of ClefOS, so there is more software to play with... worth while checking out!