Docker Inc. has presented Docker Engine 1.9 at DockerCon EU, which has taken place this month in Barcelona. This new release, which Docker announced at the beginning of the month, includes major changes on networking and volume management. Docker Swarm is ready for production and several improvements were made in Docker Compose, Docker Toolbox and Docker Registry.
After announcing improvements on networking as part of the experimental release in June, Docker considers now that multi-host networking is ready for production and thus the company included this feature in Docker Engine 1.9. Ben Firshman from Docker wrote in the company blog:
Networking improvements allow users create virtual networks spanning multiple hosts. Containers can be attached to these networks wherever they are, giving you complete control over your network topology and what container can talk to what. Not only that, but the system powering networks can be swapped out with a plugin, allowing you to integrate with any networking system you want without having to modify your application.
Docker redesigned in this release the volume system allowing users to manage persistent storage across an entire cluster of Docker Engines. Additionally Docker announced that Docker Swarm is ready for production, so the new volume system can be utilized in this context. At DockerCon EU, Docker performed different demos showing how to deploy thousands of containers to a cluster and keep Docker Swarm environment stable and functioning at the same speed. “In our tests, we’ve been running it on EC2 with 1,000 nodes and 30,000 containers and it keeps on scheduling containers in less than half a second,” Andrea Luzzardi, Software Engineer at Docker said.
Arnaud Porterie, Senior Engineering Manager at Docker and Jessie Frazelle, Software Engineer at Docker delivered The Latest in Docker Engine presentation within the first day of the event. Porterie and Frazelle spoke about the past, the present and the future of the company. Porterie highlighted the great value of the open source community that Docker has behind and the high rate of pull requests that they accept.
61% of all Docker Engine is contributed from non-Docker employees. 2162 pull requests from which we merged 1815 (80%). If you never contributed to open source, Docker is a good project to start with.
Frazelle showed some new Dockerfile instructions, such as ‘ARG’ for adding build-time arguments or ‘STOPSIGNAL’ for customizing the signal that a user wants to send when stopping a container. Docker can now be extensible through volume plugins and an example of this can be found on the Flocker plugin from ClusterHQ.
Concluding this talk, Porterie gave some lines on the future of Docker Engine, focusing on distribution rework, support for more platforms like Windows Server 2016, or splitting functionalities. Porterie commented that “right now Docker Engine and Docker Swarm have many overlaps and we decided to use Docker Engine as a common denominator”.