ISSUE 121: DockerCon Paparazzi  

“By embedding production engineering teams within software engineering teams, we are able to work more effectively, more creatively, and with greater organizational cohesion.”

At this year’s ChefConf held in May, TNS founder Alex Williams sat down with Dominik Richter, senior product manager at Chef, and Annie Hedgpeth, cloud automation engineer at consulting firm 10th Magnitude, to learn about the expanding use of Chef InSpec, a tool for compliance and security testing. On this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, the trio dove into the discussion of how InSpec fills a gap in today’s DevOps workflow, and the project’s goals for the future.

DockerCon Paparazzi

Not much in the way of surprising announcements from DockerCon this year, though the company did display some nice enhancements to Docker Enterprise Edition and to the Docker Desktop, not to mention the first commercial support we’ve seen for running Kubernetes on Microsoft Windows. The conference was, as one analyst put it, boring, but in a good way. Docker has a laser focus on the enterprise market and is following through on the vision.

And on the show floor, excitement abounded, as customers and partners looked to how the company’s technologies would improve their development life cycles. Our intrepid show reporter — and TNS founder — Alex Williams hit the show floor, along with Chenxi Wang, a managing general partner at Rain Capital, to find out what people thought of this year’s event.

“I honestly I don’t really have an idea what to expect this year,” said one passing-by TIBCO employee captured on our livestream. He wanted to see some announcements on how Docker plans to “broaden the ecosystem.” TIBCO plans to use the Docker Enterprise Edition, but make customizations on its own, so running Docker in production remains a relevant theme, or “How do you make sure it scales beyond the first 1,000 customers,” he asks. TIBCO, which has had its own cloud platform for three years now, is also evaluating Istio for production use.

In another conversation, Helen Ngo, data scientist from Canadian telecom Bell, noted that the company is looking at Docker to scale out machine learning applications. Bell is currently looking at using Docker into production but hasn’t done so yet. Helen handles both the data science and the data infrastructure — Bell is a firm believer in full stack training. “In silos, nothing ever gets done,” she said. “If you don’t have people who fully understand what that deployment looks like, you don’t get anywhere.”

During another walkthrough of the show floor, Alex spoke with Tigera founder & CTO Christopher Liljenstolpe, who noted that, during a presentation he gave at the event, he asked how many people were using Kubernetes, and about half raised their hands. That was a surprisingly large percentage, he noted. One patron from Hitachi who was walking by noted that he was looking for dashboards that show containers and virtual machines, which he could use for Hitachi’s own container-based solutions. He appreciated how security is taking a front row at this year’s show.

“A lot of companies here are demonstrating security features,” he said.

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