InformationWeek reported this week that the next release of Windows Server will feature Windows Server Containers and Hyper-V Containers that run with Docker functionality and that further details on the release will be specified at the annual Build Developers Conference in San Francisco later in April.
As Developers have been washed away by the Docker phenomenon, Microsoft has also donated it’s code for Window’s Server Container to the GitHub Docker repo.
The next version of Windows Server will not be available until 2016, enough time for the Linux world to come up with something else for Microsoft to scratch their heads over, although preview versions will be available this year.
Meanwhile,
For people that haven’t used Docker before, the tutorial covers installation, Docker Hub and Docker Files, Docker Pull: pulling an Ubuntu image, Docker Run: running the Ubuntu image and accessing the container, Docker Commit: installing node, npm, express and committing the changes and Docker Push: pushing the container back so other people can use it.
Rob Reynolds featured on the Puppet Labs feed this week, talking about Chocolatey, the package manager for Windows which, astonishingly, had nearly 9 million community feed downloads in 2014.
Chocolatey silently configures applications onto your machine from official distribution points after downloading, installing, upgrading and uninstalling.
I also quite liked the template letter to boss this week from Lisa Gregory at Puppet which served both to notify users that PuppetConf is coming up October 5-9 in Oregon whilst doing the heavy lifting of asking the boss if you can go.. just cut, paste, fill in your name and hand in to boss (hopefully not a boss that has implemented any sort of time sheeting system, or you’ll have no chance – yes this still happens!!)
A couple of weeks back now but ChefConf 2015 wound up, George Miranda gave a retrospective on the Chef blog. For many, the big pull was CTO Adam Jacob’s Chef Style DevOps Kungfu who dissected what DevOps was and the meaning of Kungfu, essentially the excellence achieved through long practice in one’s skills, something which makes Jacob reflective about a lot of people’s efforts in what is now called DevOps with heavy analogising with the schools of martial arts (see below).
The foundational document for DevOps Kungfu is up on GitHub where you can send a pull request to the repository and allows you to join Jacob’s school of DevOps Kungfu or fork for a different style.
Another blog post I thought was worth noting this week was on Compliance as Code by Jim Bird. It can be tough to work in a regulated environment where making sure, well.. regulations are adhered to and everything is transparent. For this refer also to the DevOps Audit Defense Toolkit which promotes guidance for management and auditors concerned about these crazy DevOps practices.
This post explains how compliance needs to be hard wired into automated workflows and tests for auditors, leaving DevOps to do what they do best by using common controls like code reviews, static analysis, automated testing in continuous integration/delivery, traceability using a ticketing system (JIRA), operations check and post mortem review findings.
Lastly, a piece on how to open a chrome session to watch Netflix for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 using a Debian Docker image for those that aren’t too familiar with Docker. In this example it was run on CentOS – 6.x and whilst it is pointed out that it could be a security risk, it shouldn’t be a concern for just watching at netflix.com.
