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.

An Overview on s390x Base Images

For s390x, quite a few options for base images are available on Docker Hub/Docker Store these days. They vary from enterprise environments over community distributions to minimal images. This post gives an overview on what is provided by various sources.

Docker CE for all distributions

The previous post mentioned that Docker provides CE packages for Ubuntu. For users of Debian, SLES, RHEL, Fedora, ClefOS, openSUSE, and Alpine, there is still an option to get the latest Docker CE version to their environment:

Blockchain in Containers

Neale Ferguson from Sine Nomine Associates recently pushed an interesting container image on Docker Hub: brunswickheads/openchain-peer provides a blockchain environment based on openblockchain (IBM's view and one of the efforts for hyperledger). https://hub.docker.com/r/brunswickheads/openchain-peer/ comes with a description how to use it.

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!