CenturyLink Labs Podcast

This podcast episode features Jessica Weber and Jonathan Townsend from the CLC Content Team based in STL talking to Jon Tait and Joe Pritzel of the Backup Team about Simple Backup Service, its key features, capabilities, service details, and other functionality-based elements.

On this Cloud Talk episode, the Content Team at CenturyLink Cloud talks about the team's roles and responsibilities within the CLC organization. The team works with a diverse range of platform teams to generate, edit, and curate documentation for internal and external consumption, education, and communication. The Content Team operates on a wide array to help product and platform teams, partners, contributing authors, and stakeholders so they can all have their work represented as accurately and effectively as possible. This podcast discusses the importance of continued attention to detail around documentation processes and details what goes on day-to-day within the content engine at CenturyLink Cloud.

On this CenturyLink Cloud Podcast Principal Data Scientist, Ryan Kirk who’s based in the CenturyLink Cloud offices in Bellevue, Washington joins us to chat about the Internet of Things (IoT) and Capacity Planning. Ryan sheds some light on what he as his team are currently working on and what products, programs, and ideas are currently in use. Ryan also shares information on projects, pieces of content, and conferences he is planning on working on and attending in the near future. The bulk of the conversation revolves around things in development as they relate to Capacity Planning. Additionally, the podcast shifts towards exploring new, innovative ideas and emphasizes CenturyLink Cloud’s commitment to cultivating and fostering thought leadership in the industry. One of Ryan’s key insights is the Analytics as a Service products and ideas surrounding that concept with real life applications in real-time. The conversation also covers Data-based paradoxes such as Simpson’s Paradox, Anonymity Paradox, the Spotlight Paradox and many of the associated trends that take place with regards to data analysis and cultivation.

Jon Townsend (Content Team) and Christine Parr (Relational DB Product Owner) talk about Relational Database while focusing on a. Our team is responsible for building out the database as a service product with a focus on relational database engines like: MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle. The team released its first database engine in late January of this year (2016), which is a MySQL-compatible Relational DB product.

Jon Townsend (Content Team) and Christine Parr (Relational DB Product Owner) talk about Relational Database while focusing on a. Our team is responsible for building out the database as a service product with a focus on relational database engines like: MySQL, MSSQL and Oracle. The team released its first database engine in late January of this year (2016), which is a MySQL-compatible Relational DB product.

We had a chance to sit down with Principal Engineer, Bob Stolzberg, who spoke about all things Ecosystem. One of Bob's main functions within the CenturyLink Cloud organizations is to work with other third party companies and vendors better known as 'partners' to integrate their technology with the platform at CenturyLink Cloud via automation to ultimately bring those technologies into the Marketplace. Companies like Microsoft, Dynatrace, and Vormetric are prime examples of partners that have integrated and certified their technologies with the platform at CenturyLink Cloud. Check out the Ecosystem Program Partner Resource Guide (https://www.ctl.io/knowledge-base/ecosystem-partners/partner-integration-resources/ecosystem-program-resources/) to learn more about technical integration via third party technology with CenturyLink Cloud takes place by leveraging one of our automation methods (templates, bluprints, APIs, and add-ons). For companies seeking to integrate their products and services with CenturyLink Cloud, check out the or the CenturyLink Marketplace Provider Program Guide (https://www.ctl.io/knowledge-base/ecosystem-partners/partner-integration-resources/centurylink-cloud-ecosystem-program-guide/), which outlines the process expectations for information on any requisite certification requirements and qualifying considerations. Learn more! Listen to the podcast featuring Bob Stolzberg to learn more about partner events, user groups, evangelism campaigns, community-based initiatives, and much more! Be sure to visit the Marketplace Provider Program (https://www.ctl.io/marketplace/program/) online! To express interest in joining the program, prospective partners can visit the CenturyLink Cloud Marketplace Provider Program web page or send email to ecosystem@ctl.io.

What is Docker Swarm and Docker Compose? Find out today by listening to Docker's Product Manager explain these new projects.

Docker is not the only Linux Container manager available. Recently, CoreOS launched their own project named Rocket which has some architecturally different approaches to managing containers. This week, we interview the brain behind Rocket to ask what is Rocket and why they built it.

Deis is a Platform as a Service that uses Docker and so it makes Docker application development very easy to use and very familiar if you know something like Heroku. It is very similar to a Heroku-like system. This week we brought Deis' founder back on the show to tell us about what's new including the latest changes to the public-facing APIs and future-proofing work they have finished.

VirtKick wraps awkard virtualization technology in a convenient, usable panel. VirtKick does to open source what DigitalOcean did to SaaS. Simplicity and privacy are their core goals. The project is currently alpha and the code is on GitHub - https://github.com/virtkick

Wynn Netherland is a developer, an author, and all around geek. He currently works at GitHub on APIs and other things. He has co-authored or contributed to several books, including Sass and Compass in Action, Open Government, and ASP.NET Custom Controls.

What if your laptop asked you which core you would like to run Word in today? Sounds archaic, but that's the current state of the art with server infrastructure. You still have to pick with virtual machine you want to put your Rails app in. Florian Leibert's mission at Mesosphere is to create a smart infrastructure mesh that lets developers no longer have to think about which piece of code should run where. Hear how he plans to do this on this week's episode.

Cloud Foundry is one of the oldest and most mature open-source PaaS frameworks out there, and a lot has changed since last time you saw it. For example, Diego is a small Go scheduler that can use Docker independently of installing all of Cloud Foundry to get started. Listen to this week's episode to get a better sense of all that has changed since last time you checked out Cloud Foundry with head of product, James Watters.

Will it scale? This is the guiding question for Pantheon (https://www.getpantheon.com/) CTO David Strauss, whose all-for-one-and-one-for-all improvements to web infrastructure have made the largest content sites in the world more scalable and secure, while saving developers thousands of hours in manual updates. Pantheon is a platform service for Drupal and Wordpress. More business websites run on Drupal and WordPress than on any other technology in the world. Businesses need more than hosting to build, launch, and run their websites. Pantheon is the professional website platform top developers, marketers, and IT pros use to build, launch, and run all their Drupal and WordPress sites. Pantheon powers 70,000+ sites, including Intel, Cisco, Arizona State University, and the United Nations.

You probably own at least a few O’Reilly books. You know, the ones with the animals on the cover? O’Reilly Media is well known to put out the highest quality technical books on the market. Does Docker not only change DevOps, but could it change the way we fundamentally learn technology? What does the future of technical books look like? With the rise of eBooks, videos, interactive online learning, and guided courses, online education is changing rapidly and dramatically. And what does this mean for a company like O’Reilly who’s known primarily for its paper books? I ask these questions and more this week to Andrew Odewahn, the CTO of O'Reilly Media.

How do you do databases with Docker? Or for that matter, how do you do anything that stores persistent data in Docker? Sure you can attach a volume container to your application container, but that doesn’t scale and it makes your container dependent on your host, which is not ideal if you have a multi-server Docker cluster.

What is NPS and how do you use it to get critical feedback on whatever you are working on.

RedHat and specifically the OpenShift team was an early adopter of Docker technology. OpenShift Online 3 (the hosted service) and OpenShift Origin (the open-source part of OpenShift) of was recently released. This week we talked to Krishnan Subramanian (director of OpenShift Strategy @krishnan on twitter) and Clayton Coleman (lead engineer for OpenShift, @smarterclayton on github) about why they believed in Docker so early and what makes RedHat a company philosophically aligned with the Docker project. Show notes: http://www.centurylinklabs.com/how-does-redhats-openshift-work-with-docker/

This week we spoke to a leading member of the Docker community, James Turnbull. James is the VP of Services & Support at Docker and also the author of The Docker Book http://dockerbook.com He's the authoritative brain-to-pick when it comes to all things Docker.

Sandstorm.io uses Linux Containers but NOT Docker to make it super easy for you to deploy web-based apps like blogs and webmail. In this episode we will figure out why they don't use Docker, what they are going to do with the $50,000 they are crowdsourcing right now, and what the future of Linux Containers looks like without Docker.

This week is special, we are talking with Lucas about the recent launch of Panamax and the $100,000 contest with Mac Pro giveaway.

I am proud to call Colin Humphreys, Founder of CloudCredo a friend of mine. I worked with him while building AppFog and now he has started his own company that does Cloud Foundry consulting and services, including bridging the gaps between Cloud Foundry and Docker. Because of Colin’s work, a couple weeks ago the Cloud Foundry team announced an official project to make Docker a first-class citizen within Cloud Foundry. This week we talk to Colin about the future PaaS and the intersections of Cloud Foundry and Docker. Colin is hilarious and if you listen to the whole podcast, I assure you there are a few nuggets you will quite enjoy. You can also listen to it on: iTunes Stitcher RSS Feed SHOW NOTES What does CloudCredo do? We help people get value from Cloud Foundry and BOSH. We do managed services, but we are trying to build tools to automate the manual processes involved. How does Cloud Foundry v2 handle state-full services? Right now the state problem is a challenging one. Cloud Foundry v2 takes out the database services into an abstract service binding. You are the major bridge builder between Docker and Cloud Foundry. How did you get in that position? I am very noisy and exceptionally tall. I turn up at conferences and shout at people. I have a habit of doing whatever I think is right, not really caring about the consequences. People with more fear look at Docker and Cloud Foundry and think they are competitive with each other. I don’t have that fear and I see a huge amount of value in the combination of the two. That’s why I created a prototype called Deckerwhich does just that. Can you talk to us about Decker? Docker addresses the micro world of single hosts well, and Cloud Foundry’s Elastic Runtime addresses the macro world of distributed orchestration well – what we needed was the combination of the two. Thus the idea for Decker was born. You can watch a video demo of Decker to see it in action. Tell us about Warden Linux Container manager and what the design principles behind it are, why Cloud Foundry uses it instead of Docker right now? It has been a matter of timing. Originally, the Cloud Foundry people tried to use LXC for its containers, but ran into troubles. Since Docker used LXC at the time as well, they decided not to use Docker and built their own library called Warden. A week ago, it was announced that Decker is now officially in the Cloud Foundry project, what does that mean? Now Warden is being merged withlibcontainer which will enable easier and deep Docker integration with Cloud Foundry. This means you will be able to push Docker containers into your Cloud Foundry application. When does it make sense to use Cloud Foundry over Docker? If you are creating stateless 12-factor applications, it is a no-brainer to take those containers, push them into Cloud Foundry, and use Cloud Foundry to scale them and work with them because it is so much easier than trying to run your own distributed system with containers. If you have state in those containers, it becomes far more challenging. What do you think about the pure Docker Micro-PaaS’es like Deis, Flynn and Dokku? Flynn is interesting because it is trying to tackle the state-full problem, so I am very interested in the things they are trying to achieve, but it is still early days for Flynn and it is not that mature yet. Deis and Dokku are great projects, and they currently have a more mature ability to host Docker containers than Cloud Foundry, but Cloud Foundry is going to be the way you will want to go to orchestrate those containers. What do you think about OpenShift? My take is that OpenShift has an extraneous F in its name. My background is RedHat, but OpenShift is an awful PaaS. I say this because I have tried to put it into production for a large charity client. Cloud(continued)

Jeff Lindsay is one of the most prolific people in the Docker ecosystem. He not only wrote Dokku and contributed to Flynn, two of the most popular Docker PaaS technologies out there, but he is busy creating technologies right now that we are all likely to adopt within the next 6-12 months. Here are just a few of the questions I ask him in this week's geeked out podcast. * Can you talk about your contributions to Flynn and how these projects interact with Flynn? * Can you talk to us about ambassadord? (just released) * Can you explain Consulate and Consul for people who might not be familiar with those projects? * Does this interact with libchan at all? can you explain libchan to our audience? * You are also working on Duplex, which is similar to libchan. What is Duplex and who should us that? * How does libchan play into Duplex, isn’t libchan supposed to kind of be an RPC itself? * Tell us about Manifold. What is it and who should use it? * How is Manifold different than Mesos and Fleet? * How does libswarm play into Manifold? * What other projects are exciting to you right now and why? (Configurator) * What’s next for Dokku? * What do you think the future of Docker is?

This week we discuss the future of Docker hosting with one of the pioneers in the Docker hosting space: Borja Burgos. Borja started Tutum, which is one of the world's first pure Linux Container hosters. For as little as $4/month you can get a Linux Container managed by Tutum. Here are just some of the questions from this week's interview: * Tell us about Tutum and who should use it? * Why not just run your own Docker? * How is Tutum different than PaaS like Heroku or even Deis or Flynn? * Where are the Tutum Docker containers hosted? * What happens to my Tutum Docker containers if one of Tutum's Amazon servers goes down? * Does Tutum interact well with CI/CD like Shippable and Drone? * What isn’t good about Tutum yet? * Are Docker containers going to replace virtual machines in the future? * What is possible when you combine Tutum with Github and Docker Hub all together? Seems like combining Github and Docker Hub is going to create a lot of interesting opportunities for new startups. * What does the future of Linux Containers look like? * What’s next for Tutum?

This week we discuss the future of CI/CD with Shippable founder and CEO, Avi Cavale. * Tell us about your background * Tell us about Shippable and who should use it? * How is Shippable 2.5x Faster than other hosted CI/CD services? * How does Shippable use Docker? * How is Shippable different than Drone or Jenkins? * Why is Docker particularly well suited for CI/CD? Last week interview with Docker’s CEO Ben Golub said the ideal use of Docker includes CI/CD. * How will technologies like Puppet and Chef and SaltStack interact with CI/CD? * What isn’t good about Shippable yet? * How is Shippable different than Travis or Circle? * What is possible when you combine Shippable with Github and Docker Hub all together? Seems like combining Github and Docker Hub is going to create a lot of interesting opportunities for new startups. * What’s next for CI/CD in general? What does the future of CI/CD look like? * Why are customers switching to Shippable? * What’s next for Shippable?

Tell us about your background Tell us about Docker and who should use it? Developers? Ops? Both? How is Docker different than Linux Containers? @mattapperson: What docker based host OS will go the distance? (CoreOS for example) Are Linux Containers going to replace Virtual Machines? Is Docker forever tied to Linux Containers or could it manage Virtual Machines in the future too? What use-cases make most sense for Docker? How are enterprises and large companies adopting Docker? What are the biggest problems in real-life Docker adoption today for organizations? How will Docker, Inc. make money? Is Docker Hub the GitHub for DevOps people? How will adding transparency and collaboration to the ops process change the industry? What’s next for Docker?

The #1 request from CenturyLink Labs readers is to hear about real-life case studies about Docker in production. This week, we are honored to have a fantastic use-case example of Docker in the real world. Matt Butcher is currently head of Cloud Services at Revolv… a crazy-cool home automation hub (internet of things) startup. Think Nest for everything else in the house. Works with your exiting devices (Belkin, Hue, Honeywell, Sonos, etc). Matt Butcher has written 6 books on topics like Drupal, CMS, and LDAP. He also exclusively announced on our podcast that he is working now on a 7th (!!!) called Go in the Cloud. We have been super curious how a hot startup like Revolv which hasraised $7.3M in VC money uses Docker. Here is just the audio podcast for those who are interested in listening on iTunes (subscribe):   How do you use Docker at Revolve? We are still running many core services on Virtual Machines. We have played with a half-dozen Docker technologies and haven’t yet committed to any one just yet. But we have replaced our entire CI/CD solution with Drone (a Docker based on-prem open-source CI/CD solution). It took about a week and a half. We had been using Jenkins and it was a nightmare. We are actively looking for more ways to incorporate Docker into production. We are seriously looking into using Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk with Docker, but haven’t made commitments on it yet. You wrote “Why Containers Won’t Beat VMs” a year ago. Do you still think that way? At the time of writing that article, Docker was just 3 months old and not well understood and Virtual Machines were gang-busters. Containers looked like a faddy kind of toy. But I did not foresee the cool things that came out of the Docker community like CoreOS and Deis and the other micro-PaaSes. Containers are becoming a very elegant and compelling model for building applications. From a DevOps perspective, it is starting to turn out to look like Docker Containers are the right way of doing things. What do you not like about Docker? A week ago, it would have been the perpetual putting off of the 1.0. But now that is out. My biggest concern right now is that the tools around Docker are immature, but this problem is being solved by the community right now. What is the biggest problem in real-life Docker adoption today? The biggest thing is that right now if I want to deploy Docker, I still have to use Virtual Machines and then put Docker on them. It would be great to have pure Docker hosting from one of the larger hosting providers out there. As a Docker user, are you interested/excited about the libswarm or libchan? I am most excited about libcontainer. Seeing libchan which gives go channels at the network level is very exciting too. I am still not sure what to make of libswarm. It appears to be something more for the ecosystem than for end-users. Are you using any orchestration or PaaS with Docker? Like CoreOS? Deis? Dokku? First started playing with Dokku PaaS a year ago and I like the idea of minimalist build-your-own PaaS. I think it is very promising, but still takes hour to setup all the dependencies. We check into these projects every 2-3 months to see how it looks. So far it is not robust and mature enough, but we think it will be within 2-3 months from now. However we have backed off from PaaS and are going a little lower on the stack, closer to CoreOS. You have blogged about using Drone for CI/CD… how has your experience been with using CI/CD with Docker? Drone works by pulling stuff out of your git repository, build a custom Docker image with whatever dependencies you need (binaries and other), and then execute any arbitrary command you want. In Jenkins, even if you could wire up the code just the way you needed it(continued)

This week, we are interviewing the leader of CoreOS, their CEO Alex Polvi and their CTO Brandon Philips. We got to ask them some great questions and learn a lot about the project. Tell us about your background Tell us about CoreOS Who should use CoreOS? How is CoreOS different than other minimal Linux distributions? How is web app development on CoreOS different than setting up a traditional LAMP app? What is the largest known/tested CoreOS cluster? What do you think about all the systemd controversy in the Linux community? Can you explain fleet and how to manage multi-server CoreOS clusters? Can you explain the innovative way CoreOS updates itself? Can you talk about what SkyDNS’s new etcd integration does to service registration? How will CoreOS make money? What are the biggest problems in real-life Docker adoption today for organizations? What do you think of Deis and Flynn?

This week, we are starting a new interview series as part of the CenturyLink Labs. We are going to try to keep these interviews short (30-40 mins) and packed with great content every week. Last week, we talked about Dies[1] and Flynn. This week, we are talking with the CTO of Deis, Gabriel Monroy. Here are the topics we cover this week with Gabriel: * **Do you have any statistics about how large the Deis user base is?** * Over 100 known installations * **Is Deis built to be multi-tenant or single tenant?** * Single-tenant * **Is Deis built to be mutli-server or single-server?** * Deis is built to be multi-server, but without any database or backend services managed by Deis * **What’s next for Deis?** * Deis 0.9[2] just released with Dockerfiles, Domain names and HA Routing * **How is Deis different than Flynn or Dokku?** * Different from Dokku because it is built for multi-server * **In Deis, apps are git deployed like Heroku, but can you talk about how services are managed in Deis?** * Deis does not do any database service management, only managed application code * **What do you think about ambassadors in Docker?** * Deis uses ambassadors for auto-registering and load balancing application instances transparently * **How do you scale Deis?** * By adding more Deis images, registering them into CoreOS via etcd * **What is Deis’ relationship with OpDemand?** * OpDemand is the parent company that develops the Deis open-source project * **And a few more great questions...** If you have any questions for Gabriel, feel free to leave comments in this post. [1]: http://www.centurylinklabs.com/flynn-vs-deis-the-tale-of-two-docker-micro-paas-technologies/ [2]: http://deis.io/deis-0-9-0-dockerfiles-domains-and-ha-routing/