The Journey Continues

This blog has been silent for a while. Reason is that I moved into a different role at IBM, with more focus on Cloud solutions, and less focus on the mainframe. Therefore, the blog will remain silent. I will let the blog active, as I still see quite a number of hits from search engines, so some articles seem a good reference.

However, there is a now blog on the horizon, that continues the exciting topic how Mainframe and Cloud technologies are a great complement: Alice Frosi blogs at https://containersonibmz.com/. I strongly suggest to take a look there and follow Alice's blog, as she is right at the cutting edge of this journey.

Thank you for visiting this place, for your questions and feedback. Enjoy how the future is shaped.

Run containers in separate virtual machines

The high end version of IBM Blockchain Platform uses a combination of virtualization and containerization to crank up isolation attributes of business networks a bit. We have now released the underlying technology into Open Source: runq on github.

runq allows to start containers in a slightly different fashion in a Docker environment:

Handy Search Engine for Docker Hub Images

http://soaphub.org/imagehub/ provides a nice way to search Docker Hub. You can search for strings in name spaces, and the result also displays what architectures the image is backed by.

ClefOS is official

Or more precisely, ClefOS is an official image. Official image means, it is part of curated content on Docker Hub. It is also (AFAIK) the first official image that has no support yet for other platforms. Well, this might be a dubious comparison since it is actually an equivalent to CentOS which does not have any s390x backing. ClefOS can't be named CentOS, since Neale Ferguson and company at Sine Nomine Associates are not part of the CentOS organization. However, as you can see it is very closely following it:

$ docker run -ti clefos
Unable to find image 'clefos:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/clefos
26dbd8e1d5ff: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:8e89216b23e7a5716a7e31de352ed777769738d258a1e20cc9cff06e39316717
Status: Downloaded newer image for clefos:latest
bash-4.2# cat /etc/os-release
NAME="CentOS Linux"
VERSION="7 (Core)"
ID="centos"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="7"
PRETTY_NAME="CentOS Linux 7 (Core)"
ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:centos:centos:7"
HOME_URL="https://www.centos.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.centos.org/"

CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT="CentOS-7"
CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="7"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT="centos"
REDHAT_SUPPORT_PRODUCT_VERSION="7"

bash-4.2#

This gives you a great option for enabling CentOS (or RHEL) based images on IBM Z. The identification above is technically very sane, since some projects check the distribution, and for some reason do not know ClefOS, but know CentOS.

ELK Revisited, Version 6

A previous post showed how the Elastic Stack can be used on Linux on Z. It based on version 5.5.2 these days. If you are looking at using the latest version 6.0.0, read on...

Portainer, Supported

The previous post showed that portainer is now available for s390x. Today, the project announced a support offering which can also apply to IBM Z.
This is 22 days from the first PR to the project releasing for s390x and announcing support! Thanks, portainer.io-Team, this is amazing.

Portainer -- Revisited

A previous post described how to run portainer on z. Starting today, s390x support is part of their Docker Hub image. This makes the task a bit easier. Enter

docker run -d -p 9000:9000 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /opt/portainer:/data portainer/portainer

and point your browser to port 9000. Done.
Kudos to the portainer.io team for integrating s390x support so quickly!