Tag: Docker Birmingham

Docker Birmingham March 2020

Last night was Docker Birmingham March 2020. It clashed with the Midlands Microsoft 365 and Azure User Group for the second time, so it was Docker Birmingham’s turn this time. 🙂

These events start with food and I was looking longingly at the pizzas, but I know enough about myself to know it would make me sleepy, so I distanced myself from them until later.

First up was Richard Horridge with “A Brief History of Containers”. As the name suggests this was a history lesson, but it started much further back than most do when discussing this subject. With punched cards in fact. Fortunately I never had the “pleasure” of those, but I did find myself thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve used that!”, about a bunch of stuff mentioned. That’s it. I’m now part of ancient history. I think it’s good for some of the younger folks to understand about the history of some of this stuff, and the difference in focus from the system administration focus of the past, to the application focus of the present.

Next up was Matt Todd with “Say Yes! To K8s and Docker”. Let me start by saying I like Swarm. It feels almost like a dirty statement these days, but I do. Matt started in pretty much the same way. He gave a quick pros vs. cons between Swarm and Kubernetes, then launched into the main body of the talk, which was trying to find a convenient way to learn about Kubernetes on your laptop without needing to install a separate hypervisor. So basically how to run Kubernetes in Docker. He did a comparison between the following.

He picked K3s as his preferred solution.

Along the way he also mentioned these tools to help visualize what’s going on inside a Kubernetes cluster, which helped him as he was learning.

  • Octant. Kind of like Portainer for Kubernetes.
  • K9s. He described as looking like htop for Kubernetes. 

Of course, the obvious question was, “Why not Minikube?”, and that came down to his preference of not having to install another hypervisor. It was an interesting take on the subject, and mentioning Octant certainly got my attention.

So once again, I noobed my way through another event. Thanks to the speakers for taking their time to come and educate us, and to the sponsor Black Cat Technology Solutions for the venue, food and drinks. See you all soon!

Cheers

Tim…

Docker Birmingham – November 2019

Yesterday evening I went to the Docker Birmingham meetup, sponsored by Black Cat Technology Solutions.

This event was a single longer session by Matt Todd called “Make Data Science Great Again (Part 2)” I didn’t see part 1, but he gave a summary, so that wasn’t too much of a problem.

Matt started off by introducing the scientific method and discussed reducing variables when testing, so you know the impact of a change. The suggestion being that development and data science should be the same. What better way to reduce variables than to package up a data science lab to make sure everyone is working on the same thing, so there is no/less variability between researchers, and they can focus on their work, not piecing together the kit.

He then went on to discuss Cloud Native Application Bundles (CNAB), and how they can be used to more reliably package multi-container applications, guaranteeing dependencies to a level greater than that possible by using Docker Compose alone. As an example he demoed his Digital Scientists Lab, which is a CNAB bundle containing a bunch of common kit used by data scientists (Jupyter, Spark, Flink, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Nifi, Elastic Stack etc.), which he could in theory give to several people to run experiments. It’s just his playground, but it gives you an idea of what’s possible. Using Nifi to link stuff together looked cool!

I started to make a few mental connections when he discussed the relationship to experimental data, because I look after the infrastructure for a research publishing system, and being able to keep not only the published research, but also the experimental data and potentially a way to reproduce the research findings is pretty important. It keeps those academics honest, if you know what I mean. It’s funny how just a few links to something you know a little bit about, and other stuff starts falling into place.

It was all a bit mind-blowing, but in a good way. I’m still only scratching the surface of this stuff, but it’s really good to see what else is going on in this space. I’ve added a few more things to my list of things to play around with.

It’s a couple of months until the next event, but there’s a CNCF event next month, so watch out for that!

Thanks to the folks at Black Cat Technology Solutions for sponsoring and organising the event, and to the Matt Todd for doing a great session. See you soon!

Cheers

Tim…