We just posted a new podcast episode!
In this 118th episode, AC and CJ talk about the latest news with Microsoft’s SQL Server, Microsoft considering a $8 billion bid for Slack and other cloud News.
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 118 | SQL Server on Linux, Stretched Databases, Mulling an Slack bid and more Cloud News.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
This episode is sponsored by Valid.nl
In Episode 115 of the Microsoft Cloud Show we interviewed Ross Gardler from Microsoft about their new Azure Container Service which is currently in preview. I finally got some time a few weeks ago to play with ACS and thought I would share my first experiences here. This is my 0 to first container experience.
Currently ACS allows you to provision 2 types of container service. Either a Mesos based deployment or a Swarm one. I hadn’t played with Meso much so opted to try that out.
Note: I followed the getting started guide for deploying a new container service on the Azure website.
To get started its as simple as clicking a “Deploy to Azure” button on the pre-canned Azure template. This will take you to your Azure management console where you can configure the various parameters for this template as shown below.
You need to name your cluster, pick the VM size for the nodes you want to run and set authentication details. The toughest part of this for most people will be generating the SSH keys as this is pretty foreign to many Windows folks. But they provide a fairly simple walkthrough for you to create a key pair.
When complete you hit OK and go get a coffee while your cluster is deployed 🙂 It can take a while as it spins up a few machines and configures everything.
Note: I got an error “\”The subscription is not registered to use namespace ‘Microsoft.Compute’.” during deployment the first time. I was deploying into a new MSDN Azure Subscription with free credit on it. Turns out I needed to manually create a VM in this subscription first (any VM will do) before deployment of a template would work. Once I had done this the template deployed fine.
I deployed a pretty simple cluster with 2 agent nodes and a mesos master node. In Azure you can see all the resources the template created in a new resource group such as the VMs, networks and security groups etc…
Now I had a cluster up and running I could log into Mesos. To find the URL click “Succeeded” on the resource groups deployment status and click “Microsoft.Template”. You should see a couple of fully qualified domain names.
To actually hit Meso you need to create an SSH tunnel from your box into the cluster. There is a decent write up on how to do this here.
Once you have your SSH tunnel running you can hit the Mesos web interface on http://localhost/mesos/ (this is redirected over the SSH tunnel to your meso box running in Azure).
Now you are ready to start running things! Hit http://localhost/marathon/ to open the Marathon web UI which makes it pretty simple to run jobs on your cluster.
Click create and give it a name, 256MB and 1 instance. Open the Docker container settings and specify “yeasy\simple-web” as the image name. Then in the Optional Settings area set Port = 80. This will map port 80 in the docker container to port 80 on the host. Create the app and let it spin up. You should see it in the UI similar to this:
Grab your load balancers fully qualified domain name from the Azure portal. It’s the AGENTFQDN url in the deployment details you found earlier.
You should be able to hit that URL and see your simple website running!
This is obviously only the most basic thing you can do with a Meso based cluster running in Azure, but was my attempt and seeing how Azure are approaching the setup. All in all it was surprisingly painless.
The goal of ACS right now so it make it simple to run a docker cluster in Azure using either Mesos or Swarm. It doesn’t take away the need to manage that cluster in Azure once its deployed, so you will need people who know how to run a Mesos cluster and feed and water it appropriately. Deployment is step one, but running it is a different beast all together from what I understand. I am no expert in this area and so you will want to tread carefully and make sure you have the appropriate skills on staff to do this.
I for one would LOVE to see Azure also add as Container as a Service (CaaS) offering where you just specify how much compute you want, how much memory etc… and then have Azure spin up and manage a Docker cluster for you with the infrastructure being invisible. This way you don’t need to be a Mesos master and you can let the pros run it for you.
I think CaaS is the final destination for Docker … just prior to everyone starting to espouse the virtues of true Platform as a Service (PaaS) and ditching this whole concept of apps running in containers and being aware of the OS at all.
When true CaaS comes to fruition, like it think it will in time, maybe Ray Ozzie (inventor of Azure, codename Red Dog) can all say “told ya so” about his vision of Platform as a Service being the ultimate destination for cloud computing (but being about 10 years too early).
We just posted a new podcast episode!
In this 117th episode, AC and CJ interview Borja Burgos to talk about Docker’s new product, Docker Cloud (aka: Tutum).
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 117 | Interview with Borja Burgos of Docker Cloud.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
We just posted a new podcast episode!
In this 116th episode, AC and CJ make the case for why all developers regardless if you are using .NET, Node.js, Windows or Linux should care about the Docker. In addition AC and CJ cover the latest cloud news from Microsoft with Office 365, Amazon Web Services and Google.
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 116 | Latest Cloud News plus Making the Case – Docker For Developers.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
My Trips user: The My Trips Live Tile doesn’t work on Windows 10 Mobile
Me: Strange let me look into it.
MS: Yes, you are hitting a bug in Win 10 Mobile for older phone apps
Me: When are you going to fix it?
MS: Never, please rewrite your apps to work around it.
This was a recent exchange I had regarding a problem with My Trips live tile. It’s a painful problem for my ardent users of My Trips, many of whom have been using it since I first brought it out for Windows Phone 7 many years ago.
It’s an interesting predicament for me. I appreciate the users of My Trips, but I don’t appreciate being told I need to rewrite part of the app to use new APIs to work around this bug. Microsoft has always been very focused on backwards compatibility and this flies in the face of that. Sure, my app code is old. I wrote it with C# and XAML but back when Windows Phone used a Silverlight app model … so it is not a more modern Windows universal app.
What ticks me off is I have supported the platform for years and created a reasonably popular app that filled one of the app gaps in their ecosystem. You would think that given the widening app gap that MS would bend over backwards to ensure app developers were sticking on the platform. It seems not. It sounds like there are very few apps hitting this bug and for that reason they are not going to fix it. Although this irritates me, im sure it irritates and frustrates the users more.
For me the equation is pretty simple. Time to update the app vs. return, and to be honest it doesn’t make sense given the time I would need to put in to change this code.
Side note for those interested on the code changes needed: It’s not a couple of lines of code to change, it’s quite a bit. It’s changing how the app generates tiles and how it registers for push notifications from Microsoft.
But I am conflicted. Because I know there are still die hard Windows 10 mobile fans out there that will not like me for abandoning the app. That pains me.
I have wanted to update My Trips for Windows 10 (for desktops, tablets etc…) for a while and I would much rather put effort into that. Now that Xamarin is in the MS family and I could quite easily target a version for iOS and Android at the same time whilst sharing 80% of the code.
Now that Xamarin is in the MS family and I could quite easily target a version for iOS and Android at the same time whilst sharing 80% of the code.
So with all this said I am pretty sure I am leaving the My Trips mobile code alone to wither and die. It’s been a great ride. I have wanted to bring it to iOS for a long time, especially since I’m an iOS user these days and I have had a bunch of requests for it. So hopefully I can get that done and keep My Trips an app with a future.
-CJ
We just posted a new podcast episode!
In this 115th episode, AC and CJ talk to Microsoft’s Ross Gardler about ACS – Microsoft’ Azure Container Service offering.
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 115 | Azure Container Service (ACS) with Microsoft’s Ross Gardler.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
Anyone who has listen to me rant on about how interesting Docker is on the Microsoft Cloud Show may have caught me talking about Tutum.
The short story on Tutum is that it provides an easy to use management application over Virtual Machines that you want to run your apps on with Docker. It is (sort of) cloud provider agnostic in that it supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean among others.
It was bought by Docker late last year and recently was recently re-released as Docker Cloud.
What does it provide?
At a high level you still pay for your VMs wherever you host them, but Docker Cloud provides you management of them for 2c an hour (after your first free node) no matter how big or small they are. You write your code, package it in a Docker Image as per usual and then use Docker Cloud to deploy containers based on those docker images to your Docker nodes. You can do this manually or have it triggered when you push your image to somewhere like Docker Hub as part of a continuous integration set up.
Once you have deployed your app (“Services” in Docker Cloud terminology) you can use it to monitor them, scale them, check logs, redeploy a newer version or turn them off etc… They provide an easy to use Web App, REST APIs and a Command Line Interface (CLI).
So how easy is it really?
The first thing you have to do is connect to your cloud provider like Azure. For Azure this means downloading a certificate from Docker Cloud and uploading it into your Azure subscription. This lets Docker Cloud use the Azure APIs to manage things in your subscription for you. (details here)
Once you have done that you can start deploying Virtual Machines, “Nodes” in Docker Cloud terminology. Below I’m creating a 2 node cluster of A2 size in the West US region of Azure.
That’s it. Click “Launch node cluster” wait a few mins (ok quite a few) and you have a functional Docker cluster up and running in Azure.
In Azure you can take a look at what Docker Cloud has created for you. Note that as of the time of writing that Docker Cloud is provisioning “Classic” style VMs in Azure and not using the newer ARM model. They also deploy different VMs into their own cloud services and resource groups which isn’t good for production. That said, Docker Cloud let you Bring Your Own Node (BYON) which lets you provision the VMs however you like, install the Docker Cloud agent on them and then register them in Docker Cloud. Using this you can deploy your VMs using ARM in Azure and configure them however you like.
Now you have a node or two ready you can start deploying your apps to them! Before you do this you obviously need to write your app … or use something simple like a pre-canned demo Docker Image to test things out.
Docker Cloud makes this really simple through “Services”. You create a new service, tell it where it should pull the Docker Image from and a few other configuration options like Ports to map etc… Then Create and your containers will be deployed to your nodes.
Try this once you have your nodes up and running. Click Services in the top nav, then Create Service. Under Jumpstarts & Miscellaneous category you should see the “dockercloud/hello-world” image. Select it and then set it up like this:
There are only a two things I changed from the default setup.
Click “Create and deploy” and you should see your containers starting up. Pretty simple huh!
Note: There is obviously a lot more available via configuration for things like environment variables and volume management for data that you will eventually need to learn about as you develop and deploy apps using Docker.
Once your containers are deployed you will see them move to the running state:
Now you have two hello world containers running on your nodes. If you go back to your list of Nodes you should see 1 container running on each:
I want to see the good man!
You can test your hello world app out by hitting its endpoint. You can find out what that is under the Service you created in the Endpoints information.
Try it out! Open the URL provided in a browser and you should see something like this:
Note that #1 will indicate what container you are hitting.
Want more containers? Go into your Service and move the slider and hit apply.
You will get an error like this:
This is because we mapped port 80 of the Node to the Container and you can only do that mapping once per Node/VM. i.e. two containers cant both be listening on port 80. So unless you use a HAProxy or similar to load balance your containers you will be limited to one container on each node mapped to port 80. I might write up another post about how to do this better using HAProxy.
We are a small company and we want to automate things as much as possible to reduce the manual effort required for mundane tasks. We have opted to use Docker Cloud for helping us deploy containers to Azure as part of our continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline.
In a nutshell when a developer commits code it goes through the following pipeline and automatically is deployed to our staging environment:
This way a few minutes after a developers commits code the app has been built and deployed seamlessly into Azure for us. We have a Big Dev Ops Flashing Thing hanging on the wall telling us how the build is going.
At Hyperfish we have been using Tutum for a while during its preview period with what I think is great success. Sure, there have been issues during the preview, but on the whole I think it has saved us a TON of time and effort setting up and configuring docker environments. Hell I am a developer kinda guy, not much of a infrastructure one and I managed to get it working easily which I think is really saying something 🙂
Is this how you will run production?
Not 100% sure to be honest. It is certainly a fantastic tool that helps you run your apps easily and quickly. But there is a nagging sensation in the back of my head that it is yet another service dependency that will have its share of downtime and issues and that might complicate things. But I guess you could say that about any additional bit of technology you introduce and take a dependency on. That said, traffic to and from your apps is not going through Docker Cloud, traffic goes direct to your nodes in Azure so if they have brief downtime your app should continue to run just fine.
I have said that for the size we currently are and with the team focusing on building product that we might consider something else only once we can do a better job that it does for us.
We might consider something else only once we can do a better job that it does for us.
All in all I think Docker Cloud has a lot of great things to offer. It will be interesting to compare and contrast these with the likes of Azure’s new service, Azure Container Service (ACS) as it matures and approaches General Availability. It’s definitely something we will look at also.
-CJ
We just posted a new podcast episode!
In this 114th episode, AC and CJ talk about Azure’s Underwater Datacenter, Office 365 on-boarding, quarterly results for Amazon and Microsoft, Docker Cloud (AKA Tutum) goes GA and the Azure Resource Manager (AKA ARM).
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 114 | Sea Clouds, Free onboarding to Office 365 for SMBs, Docker Cloud goes GA and Azure Resource Manager.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
We just posted a new podcast episode!
This 113th episode AC and CJ talk about the pending release of Azure Stack, an on-prem offering for running apps like Azure, New capabilities for Google and AWS and Office 365s domination in cloud productivity software.
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 113 | Azure on-prem with Azure Stack, Google IAM, AWS Certificates and MS domination with Office 365.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.
We just posted a new podcast episode!
This 112th episode AC and CJ share some of the latest Azure news.
Be sure to download the latest episode here: Episode 112 | Catching up on the Latest Microsoft Azure News.
Remember if you have a question, send it in or leave a comment.