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.

Next Step: Alpine is multi-arch

As of today, the multi-arch manifest of alpine points to several architectures, including s390x. This means, you can now re-use all the Dockerfiles saying "FROM alpine" without changes (no "s390x/"). Or, of course, things like "docker run -ti alpine sh" work without an s390x/.

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.

Multi-Arch Registry and Images

It has been a while since multi-architecture support has been developed and brought upstream. Multi-architecture support allows to put several images behind a common identifier in a registry. With that, a consumer of the image won't have to think about pulling the right binary flavor of the image, it's done right automatically for him.

A couple of things play together for this magic: