Docker CE 17.09 available

Docker, Inc. has released a new version of their Community Edition engine: 17.09. It includes IBM Z support and is available on Docker Store as builds for their preferred CE distributions (Ubuntu at this time), or as statically linked binary for all distributions. The same considerations for installation as for 17.06 (Ubuntu/static) apply for 17.09.

IBM Z images on Docker Store

As mentioned in a previous post, an increasing number of Docker "official images" include s390x binaries. This is now also marked accordingly on Docker Store. If you search for containers, there is an "IBM Z" checkbox. Activating it filters for s390x images.

Elastic Stack on Z

The Elastic Stack, also known as ELK stack, is a popular choice to manage logs. ELK is an acronym for its three main components Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana; Elastic Stack is the more recent name for it. ELK is written in Java and maintained by Elastic. The three building blocks have a clear separation of duty:

• Elasticsearch is a database for storing
• Logstash ingests logs in various formats and can transform them for efficient processing with Elasticsearch
• Kibana is a graphical, web-based front end to Elasticsearch

E, L and K can operate in a Linux on IBM Z environment. IBM's Common Data Provider can even handle z/OS logs like SMF data. Here's how to run ELK on the mainframe -- of course in containers:

Docker Official Images Go Multi-Arch

Starting today, all Docker official images (on Docker Hub and soon easily identifiable on Docker Store) are multi-arch images. Official images are credibly curated images that are maintained by Docker, the Docker community or the projects behind individual images.

That does not mean that all these images are available for s390x yet, but the infrastructure is in place to several architectures into official images, i.e. all official images are manifest lists. An earlier post explained multi-arch images and how to use it.

At this time, quite some official images are not just multi-arch enabled, but also carry s390x binaries.