Portability Series: A Go Environment

Previously we looked at the portability of container setups. One of the observations is that a lot of containers are based on a Go environment -- take swarm or the registry. On x86, that usually means golang, but we have gccgo on s390. Let's see, how we can deal with this difference.

Portability Series: Usage of a Debian Base Image: compose

So we have created a Debian base image and are looking at some of the steps to run containers which may have platform dependencies. An example which brings this together is one of the Docker ecosystem components: compose. Docker compose lets you define applications which consist of several containers. You can the manage your entire multi-container application with single commands.
Let's get the code for compose:

Portability Series: Another Base Image

In the previous post, we looked at various challenges when moving existing (read: x86) container setups onto z Systems. One challenge is the widespread use of Ubuntu as Docker base images. The closest thing on z is Debian having roughly the same packaging structure and naming.

Let's have a look how we can easily get to such an environment.

A Look at Docker and Portability

Often enough, Docker is mentioned in one breath with portability. However, there are two dimensions of portability: first, running a container on any system of the same platform. Here, Docker really simplifies deploying applications on any system (of the same instruction set architecture). From a Linux on z Systems perspective, the second aspect of cross platform portability is more interesting: portability across platforms. Often enough, getting a container to run on z is not a big deal, but sometimes it is. Let's decompose this:

The Mainframes of Real Containers

In some time off, I was able to study some serious container setups. Here are some impressions of the mainframes of real world containers (so you might be able to figure out where I have been to).
IMHO it becomes apparent that large scale deployments provide the best economics for container service providers, and the entire world's economy relies on it.