Docker

[David Martin]

Docker (http://docker.com) appears to be all the rage in the data rich open sciences at the moment. Anybody used it?

Thoughts?

[Plug1n]

I've run it up on an Ubuntu laptop and my home Gentoo box.

Probably very useful for cloud based services, e.g. "you want another 10 instances of yacf.co.uk to deal with the load over Chirstmas - no problem"!

However, I struggle to see the home or personal use but wait to be informed.

From my professional interests in security there are benefits and challenges - being able to "diff" a container is fantastic but establishing a secure starting point seems to be a challenge.  I foresee that there will be lots of problems as people push error-laden development containers into live systems.

Just my thoughts.

[David Martin]

I expect that it will make deployment/testing of complex systems easier. Looks interestign from my POV in that I can distribute tasks to students working on a known reference platform and avoid the 'but it worked on my computer' issue. A convenient way to mount host drives in an image would be nice.

[Plug1n]

A convenient way to mount host drives in an image would be nice.

Especially if you're a hacker wanting to compromise the host.....

[perpetual dan]

I've yet to use it, but from reading I see advantages for development. Less convinced about it for deployment so far.
As a way to package stuff for student tasks it has promise.

[David Martin]

A convenient way to mount host drives in an image would be nice.

Especially if you're a hacker wanting to compromise the host.....

Unfortunately the reason for having compute is to calculate stuff on data, which is kept on drives. There is little conceptual difference between sayign 'please run this docker container' and 'please open this email attachment'.

[Afasoas]

Store teh data centrally and make it available to the containers via a web server? ...possibly unfeasiblle

T'is on my list of things to play with - Im' wondering if there's any benefit to using it at work.

[David Martin]

As with all these things it is the getting data in and out that is the issue. One app that I would like to dockerise is mostly using web available data, but has a couple of config files that need to be loaded from text files elsewhere. A web interface will not help for that.
As it is me I would probably stick it all in github and use that as a coordinating access point.

[Plug1n]

If you need to share data, then use any of the established network data sharing services, as already mention web but also file share (e.g. CIFS or Samba) or any database.  Of course all those can be containerised as well.

However, don't expect the host to do this for you.

All the same things (and their problems) can be achieved with virtual machines, Docker just makes it quicker to deploy.

[David Martin]

Just gettting Docker up and running on Win7 when your home directory is a network share gets to be quite interesting. Lots of flaky things out there not behaving.

[Plug1n]

Seriously Docker is Linux only at this stage, although I believe MS have committed to future use/support.  Currently, Docker is on working with LXC, i.e. Linux Containers.

If you are following the instructions on the Docker web site for Win 7, what you are actually doing is installing VirtualBox and running Linux underneath VirtualBox underneath Windows 7.  Then Docker is actually running LXC within the Linux VM to run the desired container.  That way madness lies.

Get a native Linux environment, even if it means dual booting your work desktop.

[Afasoas]

As with all these things it is the getting data in and out that is the issue. One app that I would like to dockerise is mostly using web available data, but has a couple of config files that need to be loaded from text files elsewhere. A web interface will not help for that.
As it is me I would probably stick it all in github and use that as a coordinating access point.

Or a subversion repository. Set your containers up with an svn checkout job that runs as an in it script pull down the configuration.

[David Martin]

I am not dual booting my work desktop - that way madness lies. I have pleanty of Linux to play with on a decent cluster, VM and a few other boxes.
It looks like I can get it up and running on another VM and then play from there, though avoiding yet another login would be nice.