Containers

Apache Mesos is a fantastic tool for abstracting CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual). This lets you program against your datacenter like it's a single pool of resources.

I have been a Docker fan since almost day 1, working for a company that packaged its project to work in containers early-on, writing many blog posts on usage and related tooling, attending meetups here in Berlin and contributing to two code sprints as a mentor. Late last year I gave a talk at LinuxCon in Berlin to see Solomon Hykes (Founder) sat in the front row, a nerve-racking delight.

This talk with Cloud Foundry's Chip Childers covers the company's history, its tools, and how organizations are using them in production environments.

Check out this interview with Automic's Lucas Carlson about 2018 predictions for the container and serverless space, especially Docker.

I spoke with the three founders of replex.io who aim to help you identify infrastructure inefficiencies at every level of a stack.

Now that Red Hat has CoreOS, how will this affect Kubernetes and the rest of the cloud community?

Chris Ward interviews OpenShift's product strategy director Brian Gracely about Red Hat's recent announcement of their acquisition of CoreOS.

Chris Ward interviews OpenShift's product strategy director Brian Gracely about Red Hat's recent announcement of their acquisition of CoreOS.

Straight from KubeCon and Cloud Native Con 2018, here are some of the most exciting announcements from Microsoft, Cloud 66, Bitnami, and others.

Let's take a look at Alibaba Cloud and their plans for growth in European markets and push towards 5G.

The 19th release brings improved Kubernetes support, plus enhanced bare metal & network management.

As the year draws to a close, it’s time to gaze into the crystal command line and see what 2020 might hold.

Take a look at how StarlingX as an edge computing platform provides support for multiple low-latency use cases as well as a number of useful features.

Take a look at how StarlingX as an edge computing platform provides support for multiple low-latency use cases as well as a number of useful features.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) conducted another survey late last year and the results are now out. Here's what's popular in cloud native development.

Breaking applications into smaller coupled components like microservices, and running each of those components in containers often go hand in hand. These modern application architecture principles have allowed many businesses and software projects to make regular and rapid changes to running software and scale them to suit changes in demand and approach. In this article, we breakdown what a container is, and the direct benefits they bring to your developer teams and business.

Nestled amongst the port of Hamburg, the sound of cranes loading containers of a different kind onto vast cavernous ships, I’m at my first in-person conference in about 18 months. It’s taking place on an old cargo ship, the HMS Bleichen (German), a ship obsoleted by the arrival of containerization and now home to talks about containers of a different kind.

For Windows and macOS users, Docker Desktop has been the main way to use Docker containers for many years. While it remains a viable and usable option for hobbyists and small development teams, recent pricing changes for larger user bases sent people looking for alternatives. I am not looking to replace Docker Desktop myself, but I was interested in trying the alternatives and seeing how they compared.

I've been happily using [Parallels Desktop][1] for my Windows and Linux virtual machine needs for about the past three years. It's performant, supports a reasonable variety of guest operating systems, and, with some tweaks, can also run headless developer machines and Kubernetes clusters.

Changes in recent versions of macOS have made running macOS and Linux virtual machines far easier and more performant. Primarily used for testing, a plethora of new applications that take advantage of these features emerged, so when Mac Stadium released a free desktop version of their long-running Okra range of virtualisation tools, one feature in particular stood out to me as something different and potentially useful.

The blanket statement that bare metal is superior to containers in VMs for running containerized infrastructure, such as Kubernetes, no longer holds true. Each has pros and cons, so the right choice depends heavily on specific workload requirements and operational context. Bare metal was long touted as the obvious choice for organizations seeking both the best compute performance and even superior security when hosting containers compared to VMs. But this disparity in performance has slowly eroded. For security, it is now hard to make the case for bare metal’s benefits over those of VMs, except for very niche use cases.

If bare metal provides the best raw performance, why do hyperscalers still insist on running their own infrastructure on virtual machines? The answer reveals what the companies running the world’s most complex infrastructure really think about cloud architecture.