
Docker Betas for AWS, Azure, Mac, and Windows - petemill
https://blog.docker.com/2016/06/azure-aws-beta/
======
dang
We merged the threads on these announcements. The Mac beta is at
[https://www.docker.com/products/docker#/mac](https://www.docker.com/products/docker#/mac)
and the Windows one at
[https://www.docker.com/products/docker#/windows](https://www.docker.com/products/docker#/windows).

------
tbrock
The more I use Docker the more I realize that GCE is going to smoke AWS and
Azure in the future with regards to deploying a containerized infrastructure.

This is mostly because turn-key kubernetes on GCE is light years ahead of what
ECS provides. It almost makes amazon's offering seem like a joke.

This might level the playing field a bit by having Docker itself provide the
infrastructure management software instead of it being tied to a particular
service.

~~~
AlexCoventry
A better comparison is probably Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk / Docker
integration.

[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_docker.html)

~~~
tbrock
No, elastic beanstalk is terrible.

~~~
MBCook
Works great for us so far. Care to elaborate?

~~~
yoanisgil
I've been using Elastic Beanstalk for some time now and while I find it quite
useful for people who just want to get Docker to production without investing
to much time into Orchestration, it looks to me like there is a bit of price
to pay for that 'simplicity':

    
    
       - Elastic Beanstalk does not provide a native Docker experience. You're forced to use AWS own way of defining services and dependencies (Dockerrurn.aws.json, which comes in two versions). This means you cannot longer use docker-compose, and not all of the options from `docker run` are available (logging driver,  privileged containers, though I think the ability to run privileged containers was recently added).
        - From my personal experience deployment times can be unacceptable long ranging from 5 - 20 mins. They get longer as you add more instances to the environment or if the instances are not powerful enough.
    

I think Elastic Beanstalk makes a good choice for starters or for not so
mission-critical applications.

As a result of the points explained above I'm now looking into more Docker-
centric solutions such Rancher/Kubernete or Docker's UCP.

------
parent5446
What happened to the good ol' Unix philosophy? The docker command used to be
about containers, not service and network scaling in the cloud.

~~~
amasad
It's the idea popularized by git. Use one namespace and you have related
commands that lives under one roof. Compare that with postgressql which
installs a bunch of generic names on the top-level (e.g. createddb) which is
annoying.

The thing I would be concerned about is bloat. I enjoy and leverage dockers'
fast boot up and lightweight containers. I hope they stay focused on this.

~~~
thinksccs
_It 's the idea popularized by git_

It's also one that "source code control systems" have followed on Unix for 40+
years [1],[2].

1-
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code_Control_System)

2-
[http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/old_help/Archiving/Sccs/sccs.html](http://vasc.ri.cmu.edu/old_help/Archiving/Sccs/sccs.html)

------
julienchastang
Slightly off topic. What are people doing about user data persistence on the
cloud/Docker? Specifically, we are porting a desktop application to the cloud
via application streaming technology with Docker, but we would like the user’s
data and preferences to not go "poof" when the cloud instance disappears.
Ideally, we would like some automagic way to attach, say, the user's dropbox
account or the equivalent to the cloud instance. Is anyone working on that
problem?

~~~
pat2man
Kubernetes has persistent volumes: [http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-
guide/persistent-volumes/](http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/persistent-
volumes/)

You can use something like Glusterfs and distribute your files or it can hook
in to your clod provider and create persistent storage automatically on
something like EBS.

~~~
ShakataGaNai
When I tried it way back when, he trouble I had with Gluster is that it didn't
readily handle nodes randomly leaving and new ones joining. It was more
hardware-centric in that if a node left, you were expected to bring that
specific node back online. Is that still the case?

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Sanddancer
They need to put a note on their page that docker for windows is not
compatible with docker for windows containers. I've been playing around with
docker for windows containers for a few days, then saw this and thought,
"cool, an update." I installed, and discovered that while the client is
compatible between the two, the daemons they run cannot see the containers
created in the other daemon. MS and Docker need to sort this stuff out,
because right now, windows containers are nicer for the few images that have
been released, but docker for windows allows for the full docker ecosystem.

~~~
justincormack
We will sort this out soon, sorry.

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andor436
As usual with AWS (or anything I guess) there's more than one way to
accomplish a particular goal. How much of Amazon's Elastic Container Service
is replicated by Docker for AWS? I'm currently using ECS + Docker but this
looks potentially simpler.

~~~
petemill
Seems like there's not much in the way, at the moment, about attaching EBS
volumes, or using your own custom AMI. For example, I want to mount an NFS
share on the host to connect some container data volumes to directories
inside. I've asked about this on the new forum
[https://forums.docker.com/c/docker-for-
aws](https://forums.docker.com/c/docker-for-aws)

~~~
tracker1
What if your app was designed to work against AWS's data offerings, from RDS,
S3, etc? Unless you're self-hosting your DB, concerns about persistence are
less of an issue. Also worth considering if you are self-hosting is the
replication/redundancy in the platform, you should be able to preserve-restart
instances.

Me, I'd rather use what's available than self-host more often than not, but
depends on the use-case.

~~~
petemill
Not sure I get what you're saying. NFS is not self-hosting. In fact, AWS has
an NFS service called EFS (in preview).

~~~
tracker1
I meant writing your apps specifically against data services, not the
filesystem directly.

------
jowiar
Long-term, where does using something like this make sense vs. Mesos?

~~~
theptip
Mesos is proven at massive scale (Apple use it for Siri, Twitter use it for
their data warehouse). You can run a cluster of 10k nodes if you want. I
believe they have run simulations at higher scale than that.

Docker Swarm is not yet proven at such scale. They have run perf tests at 1k
nodes, which is high enough for most use cases, but not for truly warehouse-
scale computing. 1k nodes is also where Kubernetes tops out at (though expect
that to be higher in Kubernetes 1.3, which should be released in the coming
weeks).

On the other hand, if you're trying to run Docker container workloads, it's
going to be easier in a Docker-first cluster orchestrator like Docker Swarm or
Kubernetes; Mesos has Docker support but it's not as tightly integrated, and
doesn't implement the full Docker management API.

------
mwambua
IBM's Bluemix has supported Docker Containers for a while now, but hasn't
gotten much limelight... probably as a result of the size of their community
and Bluemix's sketchy [but improving] stability. Does anyone have any
experience using their container service? And would this be a big improvement?

~~~
patwolf
I've been using the container service for a few months. I have encountered a
case where my running containers completely disappeared and was told by
support that this was because of a "migration". They claimed to have notified
me beforehand on several occasions, but I have no evidence of this. Hopefully
this was a one time occurrence and will lead to greater stability.

One other general problem I've had is the time it takes to launch a container.
I would expect containers to be an improvement over VMs in terms of how
quickly you can launch, but that doesn't seem to be my experience so far.

I would wait a while longer before I would consider their container services
for production workloads.

------
spilk
Not a fan of the new Windows version as it requires you to enable Hyper-V,
which stops any other virtualization (Virtualbox, VMware, etc.) from
functioning. The only workaround I've found is rebooting to enable/disable it
on demand.

~~~
syaz1
What are you talking about? I had to enable Hyper-V to get Virtualbox or any
other VM solution working. But yes you're right that you can't use them at the
same time. The new native docker doesn't use third-party VM (boot2docker) and
interfaces with the host hypervisor directly. So I had to stop all running
virtualbox VMs to get docker to start.

------
GordonS
And the Windows version is still Windows 10 only :/

Many large organisations are going to be tied to Windows 7 for a good while
yet...

~~~
pjmlp
Because it makes use of Windows containers introduced in Windows 10, instead
of bring GNU/Linux with Virtual Box along.

Same thing on Mac OS X, they have migrated to the hypervisor API.

------
FloNeu
Now even docker wants me to upgrade to windows 10 ^^ Keep up the great work!

------
zymhan
Am I the only one getting SSL errors trying to connect to their blog?

~~~
KenCochrane
It happened to me for a brief second, and it is fixed now, are you still
seeing an issue?

------
tacos
They never emailed me from the last "private beta" before announcing this. And
now deploying this on AWS or Azure requires me to sign up for yet another
"we'll get back to you..." private beta.

Love the tech, hate all this marketing runaround.

EDIT to add: either your beta is ready or it ain't. I understand a gentle
initial seed to verify it's not an utter catastrophe but no need to play nanny
with my bits across 20+ beta releases. I'm a grown up. Make a disclaimer and
let me assess the risk. Your corporate logo looks like a 1970s Carvel ice
cream cake--I know what I'm getting myself into.

~~~
KenCochrane
Check your spam folder, some of the email from the last private beta went in
people's spam folder, so they never saw them. Either way it doesn't matter
anymore since Docker for Mac and Windows is now public to use without the need
of a code.

~~~
tacos
I'm not sure there's much overlap is between people who can get Docker Machine
limping on VirtualBox with storage and networking flowing properly on Windows
10 fast ring and those who don't know how to check their spam folders, but I
appreciate the tip.

No messages (and I applied via two accounts for two different platforms). No
message telling me "go get the bits!" today. And nothing in spam folders.

But yet another blog post asking me to sign up for yet another private beta...
ugh.

EDIT to add: As polite feedback--two separate requests, two separate Docker
accounts, one Gmail and one corporate email address, and I did not receive any
invite during the private beta nor notification today when it went public.

~~~
KenCochrane
You would be surprised how many people didn't see it in their spam folder.
Hence the reason why I mentioned it. :)

Not sure what you mean about no message telling me to go get the bits today.
There was no email saying that docker for mac/windows was made public, it was
announced during the keynote at DockerCon (this morning), and a blog post went
out.

Before we made it public, everyone who had signed up for the beta had an
invite sent to them, and there was no one left in the queue.

------
pgz
I don't understand why Docker for Mac is a GUI application. I'd rather get the
same features from the CLI.

~~~
KenCochrane
You can still use the CLI, there is nothing stopping you.

~~~
pgz
So I assume the new native hypervisor is available from cli as well? Then
that's excellent!

~~~
KenCochrane
Yup, try it out, and let us know if you have any issues, or ideas on how to
make it better.

~~~
DanielDent
Can it fall back to Virtualbox/vmware/parallels/etc if Hypervisor.framework
isn't available? Hypervisor.framework doesn't run on somewhat dated x86
machines.

~~~
moondev
Not that i'm aware of, but using the hypervisor is pretty much the entire
point. If you need to use vbox etc then just use docker-machine

