Everett Toews

There can be any number of reasons to run a once off task on every node in a Kubernetes cluster such as reading some info off of the node or running a quick test. But doing so is not straight-forward. None of the current resources are quite capable of it. A Job is designed to run to completion but there’s no way to ensure one runs on every node. A DaemonSet is designed to run on every node but there’s no way to ensure that it runs to completion only once. Because if the tasks exits after running once the DaemonSet RestartPolicy of Always will cause it to run again.

I use Docker for Mac (DFM) every single day. Up until now all of the out of the box configuration settings just worked for me. However, I ran into an issue with DNS and an issue with subnet collisions that required me to change the configuration. I also needed to script those changes so others could conveniently use them and the changes needed to persist between Docker for Mac restarts.

Before the final release of Docker 1.12, Chanwit Kaewkasi proposed forming a 2000 node Docker Swarm mode cluster. He wanted to test Swarm at scale, find its limitations, and live upgrade each cluster manager. To do so he reached out to the Docker community to contribute 2000 nodes to the effort he called #DockerSwarm2000. Here’s how I was able to help out by joining 100 nodes to the Swarm from my Rackspace account.

Docker Engine has a great plugin framework that allows you to write code that integrates cleanly with the Docker daemon. There are 3 different kinds of plugins you can create: authorization (authz), network, or volume. This post shows you how to develop a Docker authorization plugin in Python. An authorization plugin can control access to access to the Docker daemon based on both the current authentication context and the command context in order to approve or deny requests.

I attended my first DockerCon this year and was impressed by the breadth and depth of all of the sessions. The keynotes did a good job of covering the breadth of everything new while the sessions were able to dive deeper on different topics. I also always enjoy the hallway sessions where I get to meet a lot of the people I’ve only met online. Here are my top 3 sessions from DockerCon 2016.

One of the features I’m most excited about in Docker 1.11 is DNS round robin load balancing. This gets you effective service discovery for free right out of the box with Docker. Here’s how to use it.