SLES12 also on Docker level 1.11.2

Yesterday, SUSE published a maintweb update of Docker in their SLE 12 Containers Module. That makes Docker 1.11.2 available on all distros (check a previous post for Ubuntu binaries and IBM binaries for RHEL 7).

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:

A Private Registry. Building and Using

Recently, I received some questions on how to create a private registry. Specifically when going to a recent version, building on your own might make sense. Since describing this last (here and here), this can even be done simpler.

Let's start the build:

Docker 1.11.2 for RHEL 7 (and Ubuntu 16.04)

A new version of Docker is linked to from developerWorks. This is a bump to 1.11.2, built on/for RHEL 7.2 (which happens to be the version that Canonical also provides in universe for Ubuntu 16.04

Application Containers, System Containers

Canonical's Ubuntu 16.04 comes with LXD as "Linux container hypervisor". What is LXD and how does it differ from docker?

LXD is typically for system containers, Docker is usually an application container approach.

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).

Ubuntu 16.04 GAes and Provides Containers

Today, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for Server is available for s390x (and a few other minor platforms :-). It provides a few interesting infrastructure options: besides OpenStack and KVM, it offers system containers with LXC/LXD; for application containers, it comes with Docker. Some aspects of what this introduces will follow here...