I uploaded some pre­sen­ta­tions to Speak­erDeck.com tonight.

Here are various pre­sen­ta­tions of mine at Speak­erDeck.com and SlideShare.net:

• LKRhash: the design of a scalable hashtable. I spoke about this at NWCPP (video) in June 2012.
• Software Per­for­mance: an Overview. I gave this talk at an internal brownbag at MetaBrite in January 2016.
• Fly­ing­Cloud: Docker containers built with SaltStack. I gave this talk at PuPPy (video) in March 2016.
• Security 101. I gave this talk at an internal brownbag at Cozi in November 2011.

I was trying to get some structured in­for­ma­tion from docker images, hoping to replace some ugly Sed and AWK trickery. I could have used the docker-py library. Instead I chose to use the poorly documented --format option to docker images (and some other Docker CLI commands). Adrian Mouat gives some useful starting points at Docker Inspect Template Magic and notes that formatting is built around Go templates.

I quickly figured out that this format would meet my immediate need.

sudo docker images --format '{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}' \
    | grep $IMAGE_NAME \
    | grep -v latest \
    | head -1

That's fine, but …continue.

[Pre­vi­ous­ly published at the now defunct MetaBrite Dev Blog.]

I attended DockerCon 2016 in Seattle over the last two days and I learned a lot. It was a well-run conference with an en­thu­si­as­tic audience.

I'm astounded at the growth of Docker. Three-and-a-quarter years ago, Docker was revealed to the public for the first time, in a five-minute lightning talk at PyCon 2013. In January 2016, Docker Hub had received 1.6 billion image pulls; by this month, that number had jumped to over 4 billion pulls! DockerCon had over 4,000 attendees and nearly 100 exhibitors, who clearly believe there's a multi-billion dollar market for containers. DataDog concurs, in a report on Docker adoption.

I complained yesterday about my dif­fi­cul­ties in deploying Docker containers on AWS. I have since succeeded in getting my app to deploy on Elas­ticBeanstalk, though I have not quite ironed out all the problems.

I found several problems:

• I had to revert from a Multi-Container Docker en­vi­ron­ment to a Single-Container Docker en­vi­ron­ment because ECS wasn't starting in the multi-container en­vi­ron­ment. That meant I had to revert to a v1 Dockerrun.aws.json.
• I had to ensure that the Instance Profile had the Ama­zonEC2­Con­tain­erReg­istryRead­On­ly policy attached, so that I could pull from the EC2 Container Repository.

I complained a few weeks ago about how hard it was to deploy Docker containers on AWS.

This week has been nothing but container-related frus­tra­tion. We have two apps running in Kubernetes clusters on top of AWS. This is not a well-supported scenario and we have a fragile script that spends a lot of time sitting in polling loops, waiting for various things to happen like DNS updates taking effect, the new cluster being available, and so on. One of the apps has decided to stop deploying. I do not know why.

I've been trying to get a new app deployed on ECS, the EC2 Container Service. The way to …continue.

I made a number of updates to the Fly­ing­Cloud Doc­u­men­ta­tion tonight. I hope to give a lightning talk about Fly­ing­Cloud at PyCon on Monday evening or Tuesday morning, and I put together some slides for that too.

I spent a couple of frus­trat­ing hours this evening trying to figure out an easy way to deploy a Docker container on AWS. I tried out the EC2 Container Service and got lost in a sea of Clusters, Tasks, and Services. I couldn't connect to the EC2 instance where my container supposedly lived.

I tried Elastic Beanstalk and gave up in ex­as­per­a­tion. When you create a new Docker en­vi­ron­ment, there's no way to pull an existing image from an external repo that I could see. We have some tools for deploying a Docker image to Elastic Beanstalk, but they were so cryptic that I didn't want to pursue that.

Eventually I …continue.

I just announced the release of Fly­ing­Cloud 0.3.0 on the fly­ing­cloud-users mailing list. I'll have more to say about Fly­ing­Cloud in future. For now, let's just say it's a tool that we use to build Docker images using masterless SaltStack.

I'll be speaking about Fly­ing­Cloud at Wednes­day's PuPPy meetup.