New Docker Engine in SLES 12 Containers Module

A couple of days ago, SUSE published a major update to the Docker engine. The Containers Module now offers version 17.04-CE of the engine (docker-17.04.0_ce-98.2.s390x.rpm).

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:

Docker Update in SUSE's Containers Module

SUSE has provided a version bump to docker 1.10.3 in their containers module (with a security update 4/26). Together with their latest kernel, it provides for improved performance (e.g. starting/stopping containers).

SLES12 officially supports Docker

Since end of 2015, SUSE also provides Docker on z through their "containers module" on top of SLES 12 (SP1). This makes SUSE the first one of the big enterprise distributions to support Docker on z Systems commercially. The package also contains base images for conveniently starting. Having decoupled Docker from the SLES 12 base vehicle through a module is a goodness, this allows for independent updates on a potentially higher frequency.

Creating Base Images

In First Steps with Docker, we have used a fairly crude way to create initial base images. A minimalistic approach to come to a base image environment is to have only the necessary rpms installed through on-board tools. This assumes the system is enabled for accessing all packages online.

Inspired from https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/contrib/mkimage-yum.sh, this script works both for SLES 12 and RHEL 7: