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.