Track: Tools and Culture: What's Beyond a Stack of Containers?

The ARM to Z of Multi-Architecture Microservices

The container ecosystem is now home to multiple architectures and operating systems. Working in the isolated environment of your project makes it easy to forget about those platforms you don't use. If we've learned anything from Open Source communities, it's that inclusiveness and cooperation lead to long-term success.

Come learn how multiple industry players are coming together to ensure that no matter what platform you use, containers will still be easy to deploy.

In this talk we'll cover how to create and run your own multi-platform images using docker; how to emulate architectures in containers on your own machine; and also give a demonstration pulling all of this together in a Docker Swarm consisting of workers of different CPU architectures such as arm64, ppc64le, s390x, and x86_64.

While our examples and demos use Docker and Swarm, the principles are of course generic and adaptable to other container engines and orchestrators

Cloud Native Infrastructure With Kubicorn

Kubicorn is an open source Go project that is aimed an solving the Kubernetes infrastructure problem. The day after the project was open-sourced it had already climbed to the number 1 fastest growing Go project on GitHub. This talk will dicuss the reasoning behind the project and how the core of the tool is developed strictly for cloud native application. We will clearly identify the problem space with existing infrastructure tooling and discuss how Kubicorn satisfies new patterns that can easily be vendored into control loops and operators.

Managing infrastructure via a cloud native application is a ground breaking idea and the project is a shining example of how we can begin to reason about infrastructure in this exciting new cloud native world we are living in. We explore the bootstrap problem of needing infrastructure in place to run the infrastructure management application and look at the importance of atomic infrastructure changes.

We will learn how the tool is a lovely implementation of the infrastructure reconciler pattern defined in my book "Cloud Native Infrastructure" and learn the dangers of managing infrastructure in other ways. The lessons discussed are battle tested and have been proven over time. The audience will gain a rich understanding of what it means to run a cloud native application that manages underlying cloud native infrastructure through concrete examples from the Kubicorn project.

Containers Open Space

Debugging Containerized Microservices

The mainstreaming of containerization and microservices is raising a critical question by both developers and operators: how do we debug all this?

Debugging microservices applications is a difficult task. The state of the application is spread across multiple microservices, and it is hard to get a holistic view of the state of the application. Currently debugging of microservices is assisted by openTracing, which helps in tracing of a transaction or workflow for post-mortem analysis, and linkerd and itsio which monitor the network to identify latency problems. These tools however, do not allow to monitor and interfere with the application during run time.

In this talk, we will describe and demonstrate common debugging techniques and we will introduce Squash, a new tool and methodology.

Going Production with Docker and Swarm

Come learn the major decisions you need to make and some big lessons learned on the way to using Docker Swarm in production. This is an updated top-10 talk from DockerCon on the details of infrastructure and project planning for jumping from Docker for dev/test to a production cluster in the datacenter or the cloud.

DevOps in the Real World is far from perfect, yet we all dream of that amazing auto-healing fully-automated CI/CD micro-service infrastructure that we'll have "someday." But until then, how can you really start using containers today, and what decisions do you need to make to get there? This session is designed for practitioners who are looking for ways to get started now with Docker and Swarm in production, using the latest versions. This is not a Docker 101, but rather it's to help you be successful on your way to Dockerizing your production systems. Attendees will get tactics, example configs, real working infrastructure designs, and see the (sometimes messy) internals of Docker in production today. Based on consulting project lessons-learned and Docker team best practices, given by a Docker Captain and DevOps consultant.

Managing the Docker Change - Disrupt and Innovate

MetLife is a really big company, and you can imagine that the pace of change is not always fast. We took our first Docker platformed microservices-based application to production in 5 months. Docker and microservices allowed our development teams to create what once was, for us, inconceivable; a unified front-end application for our customers, employees, and agents connecting them to over 400 legacy back-end systems of record. On the engineering side, our challenge was identifying the right infrastructure approach to deliver this new solution on a global scale. To succeed we threw out the book on our traditional design approach and brought high velocity, fail-fast, and learn-fast methods to a tiger team tasked with a goal - take this to production in 5 months. This talk discusses some of the key changes we made to maximize our success, from tossing out waterfall, quickly identifying design patterns, rallying around open source, embracing test driven engineering, and literally "going to war" with our Ops teams. We had successes and obstacles to overcome along the way, and want to share a few of them. This talk is delivered by a Docker Captain embedded on the tiger team that pulled this off. The MetLife ModSquad. This is not a technical talk, but will focus on the key decisions, patterns, cultural, and technical changes we made and that were successful.