Announcing Docker Machine Beta

https://blog.docker.com/2015/02/announcing-docker-machine-beta/

by pyprism • 11 years ago

141 43 11 years ago

blog.docker.com

cmpb• 11 years ago

This looks pretty interesting. Could someone give me a good use-case for this? I suppose spinning up dev environment on a host other than localhost could be useful? I could also see this being useful as an interface for multiple docker-installed production environments.

Perhaps someone could give me a "for instance."

jingletells2• 11 years ago

Deploying across multiple clouds. This abstracts away virtually all of the details.

All you have to worry about is that your containers run on Docker, and as long as your provider is supported by Machine, nothing else matters, and your code isn't polluted by anything provider-specific.

dkarapetyan3• 11 years ago

In theory. I still have to see a cross-cloud solution that just works.

ehazlett3• 11 years ago

Multiple dev environments, dev env resets, using something other than vbox are a few for local. It's also nice to just load you cloud provider keys and not have to mess with maintaining images, etc. That's what I use it for. Machine also assists with setting up TLS (machine only creates TLS secured instances at the moment). One more thing, Machine has experimental support for creating TLS secured Swarm clusters. This makes it nice to test out Swarm somewhere besides locally.

contingencies6• 11 years ago

I can give you an example but don't use docker.

In the much-discussed notions of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), an emphasis is placed on shared infrastructure for performing rigorous builds, followed by both manual and automated profiling and testing processes. This typically assumes a developer-local infrastructure, a shared build infrastructure, a shared testing infrastructure, and a final or deployment infrastructure. Some organizations may also use a staging infrastructure separate from the testing infrastructure, which may be reserved for internal tests. Some organizations have multiple copies of various parts of this picture.

You can see then that any tool that allows you to intelligently interact with these various infrastructures would be welcomed. Unfortunately, I don't think docker-machine is it. It's more about building out low-level 'wows' on top of a relatively high-level platform (docker; which only meets a subset of use cases in the first place - and on a single OS, basically) than solving workflow issues elegantly to become any kind of long term standard, IMHO.

spanktar• 11 years ago

At Crate.IO, we've been playing around with deploying our clusters using Machine & Swarm, so this is pretty good use case: https://crate.io/blog/deploying-crate-with-docker-machine-sw...

rubiquity• 11 years ago

It looks interesting but seems like a very Docker-centric Packer[0] in that it has code to create ready to go with Docker images on various cloud providers and virtual machines.

The real hurdle and problems you'll be solving with Docker are when you have containers on separate hosts. Will Machine handle configuring firewalls, SSL, SSH keys and all that jazz across hosts so containers can reach each other? I've automated a lot of this myself but would love something that does it for you (other than the existing discovery service tools that often introduce problems of their own). From the post it seems like Machine will also handle this but I wonder how and how well.

[0] https://packer.io/

nchammas• 11 years ago

It looks interesting but seems like a very Docker-centric Packer

I think you mean a Docker-centric Vagrant, no? Packer is for building images, Vagrant is for launching environments.

You can use Packer to build Docker images akin to `docker build`, except Packer will let you use a variety of provisioners to build your Docker image like Chef, Ansible, or just simple Bash scripts. It's `docker build` without the Dockerfiles. [1]

Docker Machine seems geared towards launching a resource that is ready to run Docker, whether it be a VM running locally or a remote instance in some cloud. It's a single-purpose Vagrant, to really stretch the analogy. :)

Once you have a resource that runs Docker, I think that's where Docker Compose [2] steps in. Docker Compose is more like the full Vagrant in that it spins up a full, functioning environment with running services and whatnot.

[1] https://www.packer.io/docs/builders/docker.html (See the last section, titled "Dockerfiles".)

[2] http://docs.docker.com/compose/

tonyhb• 11 years ago

I've been using Machine for the past month and it's pretty good. It handles SSL certs for docker over IP address, which is an absolute PITA to manage manually. I hated creating new certificates for each machine, whereas machine does that for us. There's an open PR for adding PW protected CA key files, too.

Unfortunately, we use a custom SSH port which there isn't support for. It also adds a machine-specific public SSH key for connection.

The docker guys are great at accepting patches, so we can build this all if we need it.

zenlikethat2• 11 years ago

(Docker employee and machine contributor here)

The real hurdle and problems you'll be solving with Docker are when you have containers on separate hosts.

Agreed! There are a lot of problems to solve here, and when the recent motion in Docker networking / plugins model settles down a bit and a solution gets merged into Docker proper, it will make inter-container communication across hosts easier.

Will Machine handle configuring firewalls, SSL, SSH keys and all that jazz across hosts so containers can reach each other? I've automated a lot of this myself but would love something that does it for you

We definitely want to make the lives of operators a lot easier. It's still early days for figuring out the scope other than "let's make a tool to get a lot of Docker daemons, in a very straightforward way", so we'd really love to have you get involved and give your feedback! It handles some SSH key / TLS cert management right now, but there's a huge surface area of things we need to consider carefully.

ambrop72• 11 years ago

Thank you but I like NixOS & nixops too much.

nextos• 11 years ago

I do too. What do you think about Guix?

ambrop72• 11 years ago

Huh, I've never bothered. NixOS & Nix do what I need, and are much more developed.

davexunit• 11 years ago

Guix needs a NixOps equivalent. It's on my TODO list. Help wanted!

bfirsh• 11 years ago

In you're interested, we also announced beta versions of Swarm and Compose today:

http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/scaling-docker-with-swarm/

http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/announcing-docker-compose/

And a sneak preview of how these tools can work together:

http://blog.docker.com/2015/02/orchestrating-docker-with-mac...

jingletells2• 11 years ago

Might as well ask here. What does "beta" mean?

I haven't noticed too many crazy changes with these tools so I'm wondering what this label means to you.

shykes• 11 years ago

Basically it means 1) it's stable enough to be useful, 2) but not stable enough that we feel comfortable telling you to rely on it in production, and 3) the UI and integration into the rest of the Docker platform are susceptible to change.

vegancap• 11 years ago

I just started learning Docker the other day and was curious as to how I could use it to deploy to Digital Ocean, then I saw this! Great timing :)

jaideepsingh• 11 years ago

This helped me get started a little while ago http://chrisbarra.me/posts/docker-orchestration.html

rasur2• 11 years ago

Am I missing something here? No KVM as a provider (or on the forthcoming list).

ehazlett3• 11 years ago

There has been a request (https://github.com/docker/machine/issues/504) but no PR yet.

rasur2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I had indeed missed that. Glad to hear it's not completely forgotten.

gtaylor• 11 years ago

I didn't see a clear "Read the Documentation here" link on the article. That's a bit disappointing.

Here's what I found with a quick search on Google: https://docs.docker.com/machine/

mrkrwtsn• 11 years ago

Does anyone know if this could this replace boot2docker on the Mac? I just tried it and it seems to have similar functionality.

thecatspaw• 11 years ago

boot2docker sets up a virtual machine with docker. Machine does this too, but it also allows you to choose a cloud provider, instead of only your local machine.

zenlikethat2• 11 years ago

Eventually docker-machine will deprecate boot2docker-cli (the piece which you use to actually manage the VM). However, boot2docker-cli is (mostly) pretty stable and a lot of people use it (including me), so we don't want to toss it out overnight or without a good migration path for b2d users.

wildpeaks• 11 years ago

That sounds like a Docker-only competitor to Vagrant: it would be interesting to have a direct features comparaison because Vagrant is already pretty handy, even with Docker boxes.

mrinterweb• 11 years ago

This looks like an interesting project. I'd have to spend some time with it to determine if it would suit my deployment needs. I wrote a tool to help with docker deployment https://github.com/mrinterweb/freighter.

Announcing Docker Machine Beta

Related Stories