INSIGHTS

Introduction Last month we looked into some best practices relating to Dockerfiles and we touched on how BuildKit can improve upon that. As a continuation of those discussions, we are going to look into a specific example of where BuildKit can really help improve a build. For this example, we are going to take a look at an old Java project that I wrote years ago. The goal of the build is to create an image that can run the web application. In order to do that, we need to build 16 jars that are also part of this same project. Some of the jars have dependencies on the others; therefore, there is an order in which things must be built but also a chance to build them concurrently. Here is an image that shows the dependencies/build order.

In the most recent Docker meetups in Milwaukee and Madison we looked into the best practices for creating Dockerfiles and building our images. In the presentation we focused on:

Executive TL;DR As the smoke clears, containers have emerged as a core enterprise platform. Subsequently, informed technology leaders are asking how to enable a shift-left container culture, gain cloud portability and steer clear of vendor/cloud lock. This book combines examples from Docker's leading enterprise container platform with an agile adoption approach to guide you along your enterprise container journey.

  NVISIA is proud to announce an upcoming series of DevOps related workshops. The workshops will inform and guide DevOps teams on emerging best practices and strategies for building secure CI/CD pipelines with Docker/Kubernetes, VSTS, Gitlab and Jenkins 2.  

NVISIA is proud to announce that we are a sponsor of the upcoming Chicago DevOp Days, taking place August 28th-29th.

NVISIA's Technology Center is pleased to announce the first quater Docker public training schedule for Chicago and Milwaukee. 

Ok, it kills me to admit this as a devoted and successful DIY guy, but when it comes to using Docker for your day-job, you probably need some good old-fashioned instructor led training to become professionally competent. Yes, for the first time in a long time I have run into a technology platform where structured classroom guidance from "the source" is not just helpful, it appears to be critically important for software professionals.

NVISIA announces an upcoming training class in their Chicago Technology Center. The class provides Docker foundations for IT professionals, distributed application best practices and DevOps techniques. The class, Docker Fundamentals + Docker for Enterprise Developers Bundle, is a 4-day class that starts on 11/7/2017.

NVISIA announces an upcoming training class in their Chicago Technology Center. The class provides Docker foundations for IT professionals. The class, Docker Fundamentals, is a 2-day class starts on 10/31/2017.

Join us as we lead the Chicago edition of the Docker Fall Workshop Series! 

On October 26th at the TEC's Emerging Technology & Digital Transformation Summit 2017, NVISIA shares their proven framework for the successful introduction of emerging technologies into commercial enterprises. Demonstrating their ADOPT, BUILD & ENABLE framework to share practical insights into the adoption of API Management and containers (Docker). 

Since my last blog post on enterprise containers, I have been getting requests to help answer "the why Docker" question, where technologist are trying to educate their executive management.  While there is no shortage of information available, I ran across this eBook from Docker that frames up the Docker business case very well. It also uses a real case study to back it up. 

If you haven't been paying attention to software containers and Docker, you might want to start now. Based on the new strategic partnership announced by Google, VMware and Pivotal called Pivotal Container Service (PKS - that's not a typo), it would appear the enterprise container market is for real. In fact many IT insiders consider the potential impact of software containers on IT to be along the same scale as server virtualization.

The world of containers (the lightweight virtualization technology that may finally deliver on the "develop once run anywhere" promise) has picked up a head of steam for both developers and IT operations. With more than 12 billion downloads from Docker Hub, the Docker community and Docker, Inc. have taken a relatively obscure variant of Linux Containers to more than 14 million host machines in less than 4 years.

NVISIA's Technology Center, with locations in downtown Chicago, IL and Milwaukee, WI is excited to announce the launch of a strategic partnership with Docker, Inc. NVISIA is now an Accredited Docker Training and Consulting Partner and looks forward to serving regional clients with local, certified Docker resources.

Today Courtney Faulkner and I preseted to the Chicago Microservices meetup - slides are below or on slideshare. We discussed the maturity of containerized microservices technologies, featuring Docker's latest Enterprise Edition/Datacenter platform. We demonstarted a live deploy of microservice services (build in Angular CLI and Java Spring Boot) into a docker swarm cluster using Gitlab, Jenkins, Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) and Universal Control Plane (UCP).  If you are interested in an executive briefing or lunch and learn version of this presentation, please contact us!