What is the significance of containers? If you want to know why/how they are changing the traditional approach to configuration management and operations, and get insights into the major players, trends, upcoming standards, and future of containers in general, this is the talk for you.

1. Dr. Strangeconfig or: How I
Learned to Stop Using Chef and
Puppet and Love the Containers
Amir Moghimi, Lead Platform Engineer
Deloitte Platform Engineering

2. Trends
Containers are everywhere!
According to Redmonk, across Fortune 100 companies:
(http://redmonk.com/fryan/2017/09/10/cloud-native-technologies-in-the-fortune-100)
● Docker is running at 71%
● Kubernetes is running at 54%

3. Trends
Datadog (2017):

4. Trends
Datadog (2017):

5. Trends
Datadog (2017):

6. Trends
Datadog (2017):
● Interestingly, larger companies are leading the adoption
○ More hosts
○ More software
○ More configuration
● Docker adopters increase the average number of running containers in
production by more than 5 times in the first year
○ Continues linearly even after that

7. A System Engineer’s dream
Similar to how we install desktop applications:
yum install google-chrome-stable
What if you could install server side applications:
<something> install stable/jenkins

8. Understanding the problem
Configuration
Most server side
applications are too
complex to configure as is.
They require many:
● Dependencies
● Config files
● Command line args
● Environment vars
● Ports/socks
Environment
Runtime environments are
too versatile:
● Different OS
distros/versions
● Dependent on
infrastructure and
operations choices
● Different
provisioning tools
Scalability
● Monolith
applications do not
scale at runtime
● Monolith
applications do not
scale at
design/development
● Operations/DevOps
teams do not scale
● Self-healing

9. Containers objective:
Make building, shipping and
running applications
dramatically easier and faster.

10. Understanding the solution

11. Main parts of the solution
Container
● A portable application image
● Easy to configure (12-Factor App)
● Standard signal handling
● Standard logging
● A portable runtime
Orchestration
● Application declaration language
● Scheduling
● Monitoring
● Replication
● Discoverability
● Storage provisioning
● Access control
● Log shipping

12. Solution
Docker
● Container image
● Container runtime
● Best practices
Kubernetes
● Everything else
helm install stable/jenkins

13. Helm
Over 90 stable apps
Including Artifactory, Redis, RabbitMQ, Drupal, Hadoop, Minecraft, SugarCRM,
OrangeHRM, Factorio, etc.
Over 30 incubator apps
Including ElasticSearch, Cassandra, Vault, Riemann, etc.

14. Standards
● Open Container Initiative (OCI) Specification
○ runC
○ containerD
● Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
○ Mission
■ Container packaged
■ Dynamically managed
■ Micro-services oriented
○ Certified kubernetes offerings
● Open Service Broker API
○ Ultimate micro-service experience!

15. Who orchestrates the orchestrator?
● Cloud:
○ AWS: kops, ECS
○ Google GKE
○ Azure AKS
○ Bluemix Container Service
● On-premise:
○ RedHat OpenShift
○ CoreOS Tectonic
○ Docker EE
○ BYO

16. Questions?