Container Camp SF 2015: What you missed

For those who do not know Container Camp is a community conference on software virtualization geared towards the infrastructure and deployment of containerized applications.

After Container Camp’s first success in London, Container Camp is back in action, hosted in San Fransisco and better than ever.

First up was Bryan Cantrill, CTO at Joyent. Brian starts the proceedings with a dive to the past, reminiscing on the technical decisions made in computing, from the 70’s with the Unix Philosophy, through to monolithic architectures and then micro-services. As Brian would like to say “Micro-services is the Unix Philosophy applied to distributed systems”. Hell, we even got a blast from the past with mentions of the IBM 1401 and the Honeywell 200 when discussing hardware, software and OS-level virtualization.

Brian’s talk was an excellent kick off to the conference and we even got a very exciting demo of Triton in action.

Joe Brockmeier works for Red Hat on the Open-Source and Standards group. He is the “Do-er of things”. Joe gives a fascinating insight into Project Atomic and what Atomic hosts should and should not provide. Joe also shows us the tools and the mindset that are being applied to Project Atomic including rpm-ostree.

Andrea Luzzardi and Victor Vieux present an overview of Swarm by Docker, showing us what has just been released and the future plans moving forward. We got to witness (and so can you if you watch the video) Swarm in action in all its Docker clustering excellence.

This is the talk that we have all been waiting for YLD’s own Luke Bond, Luke dives into how he has tackled Multi-host docker networking and service discovery while developing Paz.

Luke looks at the various ways in which to implement software service discovery using Docker, giving examples of the different techniques he has used in the past and present.

His talk gives an excellent insight into the mindset when developing with micro-services and the problems that may arise. 10/10, is nice!

Luke Marsden’s talk begins with a discussion around handling state in Docker and how to move stateful containers across nodes with Flocker. Luke introduces Powerstrip as a way to compose prototypical Docker extensions to provide new functionality.

Tim Hockin spoke about containers, Kunernetes and Google’s approach to these subjects. “Google deploy 2 billion containers a week”! This talk is a perfect complement to the release of the Borg paper. We get to find out about how Kubernetes has learnt from Borg and how it has adapted (for better) to the changes in computing since Borg was designed. This talk really was containers, containers, containers.

This talk was a really brilliant technical overview of Kubernetes (“Kubes”), the architecture, design, implementation of components and a bunch of other really interesting concepts that Kubernetes introduces.

Brandon Philips’s talk was a look at the App Container Spec, the tool CoreOS built (Rocket) which was built to the App Container Spec and the need for this specification.

What we really like about Rocket is that it has no need for a daemon, as containers run directly under the spawning process.

Ross Kukulinski io.js/node.js evangelist and Bay-Node co-organizer, breaks down the trials and tribulations of taking Yodlr from a monolithic application built in 3 weeks into scalable, micro-service based applications using Docker containers.

Khash Sajadi gives a brilliant non-technical talk on how to build a product to cater for multiple workloads, without pre-empting what these workloads will be. If you want to be told why you should be using containers and the benefits that they give you, this talk is the one you need to watch.

Bridget Kromhout, operations engineer at DramaFever and co-host of @ArrestedDevOps gave us a deep-dive straight into how Drama Fever manages scaling a large video hosting platform and how they implemented docker while it was still in its infancy.

Ben Firshman, second British speaker and third Docker employee on stage, talks about docker-compose (previously known as Fig). Ben goes on to give a brilliant demo using docker-compose, Swarm, Powerstrip, Plocker, Weave and the Docker engine! Brilliant stuff!

John Wetherill’s talk cannot be described in text, so instead just watch the video

Last talk of the day, and it is a smashing one: Jessie Frazelle from Docker (not related to the latest Debian release), gives a unique insight into what it takes to run OpenGL inside of Docker — packaging graphical drivers within Docker and getting Google Chrome and games (yes, 3d games on linux) running within Docker! Much excited!