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:

Closing Another Base Image Gap

Most recently, I mentioned (here and here) how to best deal with the fact that Ubuntu is widely used as base image, but does not exist on z Systems. A sufficiently close Debian is a decent solution for that.

Today's announcement at LinuxCon shows how this will get even easier: Ubuntu will be made available on z Systems. This will make all "FROM ubuntu" images no-brainers.

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.