2

vol.

APPLICATIONS
& MICROSERVICES
WITH

DOCKER

& CONTAINERS
EDITED & CURATED BY ALEX WILLIAMS

The New Stack:

The Docker and Container Ecosystem eBook Series
Alex Williams, Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Benjamin Ball, Technical Editor & Producer
Hoang Dinh, Creative Director
Sam Charrington, Editor, Founder and Principal Analyst of CloudPulse
Strategies
Contributors:
Joab Jackson, Managing Editor
Judy Williams, Copy Editor
Lawrence Hecht, Data Research Director
Michelle Maher, Copy Editor
Patricia Dugan, Director of Community Marketing & Development

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 4
Sponsors ........................................................................................................................................ 6
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

From Monolith to Microservices ................................................................................................ 7

The Ten Commandments of Microservices ..........................................................................20
How Microservices Have Changed and Why They Matter ..................................................30
Apcera: Creating Standards for the Container Ecosystem .................................................40
Containers in Production, Part I: Case Studies .....................................................................41
Cisco: Microservices Frameworks for Handling Complexity at Scale ..............................51
The Developers and Companies Shaping the Open Source Container Ecosystem .....52
Docker: Rethinking the Development and Delivery Environments..................................72
........................................................................73
IBM: The Evolution of Architectures at Container-Scale.....................................................81
Leveraging Containers to Provide Feedback Loops for Developers ................................82
Joyent: A Historical Perspective and the Future of Containers.........................................90
How Containers and Microservices Work Together to Enable Agility ..............................91
Pivotal: What Does It Mean to Be Cloud Native? ..................................................................99
The Role of Platform-as-a-Service in the Container Era ..................................................100
VMware: Integrating Containers Allows Businesses to Move Faster..............................105
Achieving Innovation and Agility With Cloud-Native Application Architectures .........106
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES DIRECTORY

Microservices Frameworks .....................................................................................................123

Provision of Capabilities for Microservices .........................................................................129
Deployment and Continuous Integration ...........................................................................139
Disclosures.................................................................................................................................147

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

INTRODUCTION
As an architectural pattern, microservices have been getting a lot of
attention in the last several years, reaching a level of adoption and
evangelism that would be hard for most practitioners to ignore. But while
microservices architectures have received wide praise as changing the
application development and production process on the whole, there are
name for service-oriented architecture (SOA). Its important to explore
both the drivers that shaped how microservices evolved into the pattern
we know today, and also to understand what tools and services have
made its current popularity so widely accessible.
In this ebook, The New Stack explores the ways that container-based
microservices have impacted application development and delivery. We
learn about what containers mean to the process of creating and utilizing
microservices. Through that lens, we look at how container technology
has become so important in implementing the pattern of microservices.
Within this ebook, we explore what makes up a microservices architecture,
as well as some processes around migrating monolithic applications to
microservices. We also provide case studies for containers in production.
There is also a great deal of original research weve performed about the
open source container ecosystem that we are eager to share with our
broader community; this series focus on open source communities is a
continuing topic that we are looking to expand upon, and we welcome
feedback on what weve done so far.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

INTRODUCTION

ebook, The Docker & Container Ecosystem. Understanding the role of

containers and microservices in application development and
architecture will allow us to later address the complex topics ahead in our
next ebook, Automation & Orchestration with Docker & Containers,
where well cover orchestration, service discovery, schedulers, cluster
distributed systems.
This ebook, as well as the three to come in this series, breaks down our
analysis of the ecosystem into areas of focus that need the added depth
of an entire book. We discovered early on that theres much more to say
about the container ecosystem, and this series is likely just the start for us.
Were constantly looking for new topics in need of greater focus and
education, and we welcome any feedback on what areas we should tackle
next.
Thanks so much for your interest in our ebook series. Please reach out to
our team any time with feedback, thoughts, and ideas for the future.
Thanks,
Ben
Benjamin Ball
Technical Editor and Producer
The New Stack

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

SPONSORS
We are grateful for the support of the following ebook series sponsors:

And the following sponsors for this ebook:

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

FROM MONOLITH TO
MICROSERVICES
by VIVEK JUNEJA

manage complex enterprise systems. It is a delicate balancing

act, one that rests on understanding how any one change will

systems codebase before they can even begin to work on it. Even the
most knowledgeable of development teams is fearful of making changes
or adding new code that would disrupt operation in some unforeseen
way, so the most mundane of changes is discussed ad nauseum.
When things go wrong, operations blames development and development
blames QA. Project managers blame the budget and everyone else. The
replace the internal team.
Unless youve been living under a rock, youve heard of how microservices
can turn this scenario on its head, enabling a new, more agile world in
which developers and operations teams work hand in hand to deliver
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

single monolithic system, functionality is carried out by a smaller set of

services coordinating their operations.
How do you make it work? Youve come to the right place. Well explain it
exist, it is helpful to examine the base principles that have guided

Adopting Microservices
One common approach for teams adopting microservices is to identify
existing functionality in the monolithic system that is both non-critical
and fairly loosely coupled with the rest of the application. For example, in
for a microservices proof-of-concept. Alternately, more sophisticated
teams can simply mandate that all new functionality must be developed
as a microservice.
In each of these scenarios, the key challenge is to design and develop the
integration between the existing system and the new microservices. When
a part of the system is redesigned using microservices, a common
practice is to introduce glue code to help it to talk to the new services.
An API gateway can help combine many individual service calls into one
coarse-grained service, and in so doing reduce the cost of integrating with
the monolithic system.
The main idea is to slowly replace functionality in the system with discrete
microservices, while minimizing the changes that must be added to the
system itself to support this transition. This is important in order to reduce
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

the cost of maintaining the system and minimize the impact of the
migration.

Microservices Architectural Patterns

A number of architectural patterns exist that can be leveraged to build a
solid microservices implementation strategy.
In their book The Art of Scalability, Martin Abbott and Michael Fisher
elaborated on the concept of the scale cube, illustrating various ways to
think about the use of microservices to more easily scale systems (Figure
1). The microservices pattern maps to the Y-axis of the cube, wherein
functional decomposition is used to scale the system. Each service can
then be further scaled by cloning (X-axis) or sharding (Z-axis).
Alistair Cockburn introduced the ports and adapters pattern, also called
hexagonal architecture, in the context of building applications that can be
tested in isolation. However, it has been increasingly used for building
reusable microservices-based systems, as advocated by James Gardner
and Vlad Mettler. A hexagonal architecture is an implementation of a
pattern called bounded context, wherein the capabilities related to a

Examples abound of these principles being put to practice by enterprises

migrating to microservices. Click Travel open sourced their Cheddar
framework, which captures these ideas in an easy-to-use project template
for Java developers building applications for Amazon Web Services.
application, based their microservices migration on the use of the
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

The Scale Cube and Microservices: 3 Dimensions to Scaling

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

Maximum scalability

Scale by Using Microservices

Y-Axis (functional decomposition)
Scale by Sharding Databases
Z-Axis (data partitioning)

Monolithic system

Scale by Cloning Services

X-Axis (horizontal duplication)

http://microservices.io/articles/scalecube.html

FIG 1: Illustrating Martin Abbott and Michael Fishers scale cube method of scaling

systems with functional decomposition.

bounded context pattern to identify cohesive feature sets which did not
couple with the rest of domain.
One challenge faced by teams new to microservices is dealing with
distributed transactions spanning multiple independent services. In a
monolith this is easy, since state changes are typically persisted to a
common data model shared by all parts of the application. This is not the
case, however, with microservices. Having each microservice managing its
own state and data introduces architectural and operational complexity
when handling distributed transactions. Good design practices, such as
domain-driven design, help mitigate some of this complexity by inherently
limiting shared state.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

10

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

Event-oriented patterns such as event sourcing

responsibility segregation (CQRS) can help teams ensure data consistency
in a distributed microservices environment. With event sourcing and
CQRS, the state changes needed to support distributed transactions can
be propagated as events (event sourcing) or commands (CQRS). Each
microservice that participates in a given transaction can then subscribe to
the appropriate event.
This pattern can be extended to support compensating operations by the
microservice when dealing with eventual consistency. Chris Richardson
presented an implementation of this in his talk at hack.summit() 2014 and
shared example code via GitHub. Also worth exploring is Fred Georges
notion of streams and rapids, which uses asynchronous services and a
high speed messaging bus to connect the microservices in an application.
While these architectures are promising, it is important to remember that,
during the transition from monolith to a collection of microservices, both
systems will exist in parallel. To reduce the development and operational
costs of the migration, the patterns employed by the microservices must
be appropriate to the monoliths architecture.

Architectural & Implementation

Considerations
Domain Modeling
Domain modeling is at the heart of designing coherent and loosely
coupled microservices. The goal is to ensure that each of your

microservices in the system.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

11

Scaling With Microservices

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

Microservice architectures have 3 dimensions of scalability

1. Functional Decomposition
Y-Axis Scaling

3. Horizontal Scaling of Individual Services

X-Axis Scaling

2. Data Partitioning
Z-Axis Scaling

Monolith

Microservices

h t t p : / / m a r t i n fo w l e r. c o m / a r t i c l e s / m i c ro s e r v i c e s. h t m l

FIG 2: With microservices in place as a foundation, additional levels of scalability can

be achieved via data partitioning and horizontal scaling.

Isolating and insulating microservices also helps ensure their reusability.

For example, consider a promotions service that can be extracted from a
monolithic e-commerce system. This service could be used by various
consuming clients using mobile Web, iOS or Android apps. In order for this
to work predictably, the domain of promotions, including its state
entities and logic, needs to be insulated from other domains in the
system, like products, customers, orders, etc. This means the
promotions service must not be polluted with cross-domain logic or
entities.
Proper domain modeling also helps avoid the pitfall of modeling the
system along technological or organizational boundaries, resulting in data
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

12

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

services, business logic and presentation logic each implemented as

separate services.

All roads to microservices pass

through domain modeling.
Sam Newman discusses these principles in his book Building
Microservices. Vaughn Vernon focuses on this area even more deeply in
Implementing Domain-Driven Design.

Service Size
Service size is a widely debated and confusing topic in the microservices
community. The overarching goal when determining the right size for a
microservice is to not make a monolith out of it.
The Single Responsibility Principle is a driving force when considering
the right service size in a microservices system. Some practitioners
advocate as small a service size as possible for independent operation
and testing. Building microservices in the spirit of Unix utilities also leads
to small codebases which are easy to maintain and upgrade.
Architects must be particularly careful in architecting large domains, like
products in an e-commerce system, as these are potential monoliths,
of products, for example. For each type of product, there could be
Encapsulating all this can become overwhelming, but the way to
approach it is to put more boundaries inside the product domain and
create further services.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

13

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

Another consideration is the idea of replaceability. If the time it takes to

replace a particular microservice with a new implementation or
technology is too long (relative to the cycle time of the project), then its

Testing
Lets look at some operational aspects of having the monolithic system
progressively transformed into a microservices-based system. Testability
is a common issue: during the course of developing the microservices,
teams will need to perform integration testing of the services with the
monolithic system. The idea, of course, is to ensure that the business
operations spanning the pre-existing monolithic system and the new
microservices do not fail.
One option here is to have the system provide some consumer-driven
contracts that can be translated into test cases for the new
microservices. This approach helps ensure that the microservice always
has access to the expectations of the system in the form of automated
tests. The systems developers would provide a spec containing sample
to create relevant mocks, and as the basis for an automated test suite
that is run before integrating the new microservices with the existing
system. Pact, a consumer-driven contract testing library, is a good
reference for this approach.
Creating a reusable test environment that can deploy a test copy of the

for those teams and improves the feedback loop for the project as a
whole. A common way of accomplishing this is to containerize the entire
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

14

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

monolith in the form of Docker containers orchestrated through an

automation tool like Docker Compose. This deploys a test infrastructure
integration tests locally.

Service Discovery
A service may need to know about other services when accomplishing a
business function. A service discovery system enables this, wherein each
service refers to an external registry holding the endpoints of the other
services. This can be implemented through environment variables when
dealing with a small number of services; etcd, Consul and Apache
ZooKeeper are examples of more sophisticated systems commonly used
for service discovery.

Deployment
Each microservice should be self-deployable, either on a runtime
container or by embedding a container in itself. For example, a JVM-based
microservice could embed a Tomcat container in itself, reducing the need
for a standalone web application server.
At any point in time, there could be a number of microservices of the
same type (i.e., X-axis scaling as per the scale cube) to allow for more

. This implementation allows for failover and transparent

Build and Release Pipeline

common, such as having a continuous integration and deployment
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

15

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

pipeline. The notable caveat for this in a microservices-based system is

having an on-demand, exclusive, build and release pipeline for each
microservice. This reduces the cost of building and releasing the
application as a whole.

We do not need to build the

monolith when a microservice gets
updated. Instead, we only build the
changed microservice and release it
to the end system.
Release practices also need to include the concept of rolling upgrades or
blue-green deployment. This means that, at any point of time in a new
build and release cycle, there can be concurrent versions of the same
microservice running in the production environment. A percentage of the
active user load can be routed to the new microservice version to test its
operation, before slowly phasing out the old version. This helps to ensure
that a failed change in a microservice does not cripple the monolith. In
case of failure, the active load can be routed back to the old version of the
same service.

Feature Flags
One other common pattern is to allow for

us to trigger the use of the relevant microservice for the feature when the

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

16

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

the monolith to microservices.

If the monolith version of a feature and the new microservice replicating

teams more rapidly build the end system.

Developer Productivity During

Microservices Adoption
still small. However, this becomes a development and operations
nightmare as the system grows up.

If working with your monolith was

always as painful as it is now, you
probably wouldnt have it. Rather,
systems become monoliths because
adding onto the monolith is easy at
when building a new feature or system is complicated and has many
moving parts. Doing so demands strong disciplines around architecture
and automation, which in turn helps create an environment that allows

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

17

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

One approach to building out this developer infrastructure is to create a

standard boilerplate project that encapsulates key principles of
microservice design, including project structure, test automation,
integration with instrumentation and monitoring infrastructures, patterns
like circuit breakers and timeouts, API frameworks, and documentation
hooks, among others.
and more on building business functionality in a distributed microservicesbased environment. Projects like Dropwizard, Spring Boot, and Karyon are
interesting approaches to solving this. Making the right choice between
them depends on the architecture and developer skill level.

Monitoring and Operations

monitoring of performance, systems and resources. This is more
pronounced if a particular feature from the monolith is replicated through
a microservice. Collecting statistics for performance and load will allow
the monolithic implementation and the microservices-based one
replacing it to be compared. This will enable better visibility into the gains
that the new implementation brings to the system, and improve

Organizational Considerations
The most challenging aspects of moving from monoliths to microservices

multidisciplinary units which include developers, testers and operations

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

18

FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES

Conclusion
Most of the ideas shared in this article have either been practiced or have
delivered results in organizations of all sizes. However, this is not a
evolving patterns and adoption war stories. As more organizations move
from monolithic systems to microservices, we will have more to learn
along our journey.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

19

THE TEN
COMMANDMENTS OF
MICROSERVICES
by JANAKIRAM MSV

computing model, componentization with component object

multitier architecture with .NET and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), and more
recently, web-scale computing.

Microservices 101
With Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it is fascinating to implement the
concept of scale-out and elasticity on cloud platforms. DevOps can create
dependencies and code. As long as the application servers and web
servers are stateless, they can scale from a handful of instances to a few
either get launched or terminated without much intervention.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

20

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

This architecture addressed the complex challenge of capacity planning.

underutilization or overprovisioning of resources. Cloud infrastructure
made the virtual machine the unit of deployment and execution. An
applications scalability factor depended on the ability to rapidly multiply
virtual machines (VMs). Though the VM was an ideal choice for the unit of
deployment, the unit of code continued to be a module or a component.
It was overkill to create a one-to-one mapping between the component
and the VM.
With the emergence of containers, the unit of deployment gradually
technologies, such as LXC, Docker, runC and rkt, make it possible to run
multiple containers within the same VM. This enables DevOps to package
each component or module as a container. Each container has
component needs to run as a standalone unit. Like stateless components,
containers can be designed to accept input and send output, if any.
The composition of these containers can logically form an application.
The focus of an application becomes orchestrating multiple containers to
achieve the desired output.

A collection of independent,
autonomous containers participating
microservices architecture.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

21

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

This design relies more on containers and less on the underlying

infrastructure, such as VMs or physical servers. Since the unit of
deployment is a container, there can be more containers per VM or
physical server.
Microservices architecture has its roots in proven distributed computing
models like COM, CORBA and EJB. Best practices from these
technologies are still relevant in the microservices era. Some think of
microservices as service-oriented architecture (SOA) with an emphasis
on small ephemeral components.

Containers and Microservices

There is a misconception that moving a monolithic application to
containers automatically turns it into a microservice. The best way to
understand this concept is to think of virtualization and cloud. During the
initial days of IaaS, many CIOs claimed they were running a private cloud;
but, in reality, they were only implementing virtualization. Commonly,
attributes like self-service, elasticity, programmability and pay-by-use
While microservices may use containerization, not every containerized
application is a microservice. This is an important aspect to understand
before we proceed to discuss best practices.

1. Clean Separation of Stateless and

Stateful Services
Applications composed of microservices contain both stateless and
stateful services. It is important to understand the constraints and
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

22

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

limitations of implementing stateful services. If a service relies on the

state, it should be separated into a dedicated container thats easily
accessible.
One of the key advantages of microservices is the ability to scale rapidly.
Like other distributed computing architectures, microservices scale better
when they are stateless. Within seconds, multiple containers can be
launched across multiple hosts. Each container running the service is
autonomous and doesnt acknowledge the presence of other services.
scaling the VMs. For this pattern to work seamlessly, services should be
stateless. Containers are ephemeral and thus become an ideal choice for
microservices.
A microservices-based application may contain stateful services in the
form of a relational database management system (RDBMS), NoSQL

Technologies, such as Flocker and Docker volume plugins, address this

problem by creating a separate persistence layer thats not
host-dependent.
available cloud data stores to provide a persistence layer. Both

data stores trade consistency for availability, meaning that we have to

design for eventual consistency in our data model.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

23

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

Technologies, such as Flocker, help address the host portability problem

by creating a persistence layer thats not host dependent. The new cloud
datastores, such as Redis, Cassandra, and IBMs Cloudant, maximize
availability with minimal delay on consistency. As container technologies
evolve, it will become easier to tackle the stateful services problem.

2. Do Not Share Libraries or SDKs

units of code that do one thing and one thing only. This is closely aligned
with the principle of dont repeat yourself (DRY), which states that every
piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative
representation within a system.
Every service is a self-contained unit of OS, runtime, framework, thirdparty libraries and code. When one or more containers rely on the same
library, it may be tempting to share the dependencies by centrally

pipeline. Upgrading the library or SDK might end up breaking a service.

Each service should be treated entirely independent of others.
In some scenarios, the commonly used libraries and SDKs can be moved
to a dedicated service that can be managed independently, making the
service immutable.

assumptions can be made about the host on which the service would run.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

24

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

Each service can be launched on any available host in the cluster that

function independently of the host on which they are deployed.

In case of stateful services, a dedicated persistent (data volume) container
should be considered.

4. Focus on Services with One Task in

Mind
Each service must be designed with one task in mind. It may map to one
may also be one process per container, but thats not always the case.

from virtual machines. While a virtual machine may run the whole stack, a
container owns a subset of the stack. For example, when refactoring a
LAMP web application for microservices, the web tier with Apache runs in
a dedicated container while MySQL moves to another container.

5. Use Lightweight Messaging Protocol

for Communication
There is no hard-and-fast rule on how microservices talk to each other.
They can use synchronous or asynchronous channels with any protocol
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

25

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

response mechanism. Its common for microservices to expose wellknown HTTP endpoints that can be invoked through REST API calls.
While HTTP and REST are preferred for synchronous communication, its
becoming increasingly popular to use asynchronous communication
between microservices. Many consider the Advanced Message Queuing
Protocol (AMQP) standard as the preferred protocol, in this regard.
Developing microservices with an asynchronous communication model,
while sometimes a little more complex, can have great advantages in
terms of minimizing latency and enabling event-driven interactions with
applications.
In the market today, RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka are both commonly
used message bus technologies for asynchronous communication
between microservices. Also, if the message-passing is done on the same
host, then the containers can communicate with each other by way of
system calls, as they all share the same kernel.

Exit Point
In most cases, microservices are treated like a black box, with less visibility
into the actual implementation. With inconsistent entry points and exit
points, it will be a nightmare to develop a composed application.

services to seamlessly talk to each other. Even if a microservice is not

expected to return an explicit value, it may be important to send the
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

26

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

debug and maintain the code.

7. Implement a Self-Registration and

Discovery Mechanism
One of the key aspects of microservices is the discovery of a service by the
consumer. A central registry is maintained for looking up all available
services.
Each microservice handles registration within the central service registry.
They typically register during the startup and periodically update the
registry with current information. When the microservice gets terminated,
it needs to be unregistered from the registry. The registry plays a critical
role in orchestrating microservices.
Consul, etcd and Apache Zookeeper are examples of commonly used
exposes registration APIs to services for registering and unregistering.

8. Explicitly Check for Rules and

Constraints
During deployment, microservices may need to consider special
in-memory cache service needs to be on the same host as the web API
service. The database microservice may have to be deployed on a host
with solid-state drive (SSD) storage. The master and slave containers of
the database cannot exist on the same host. These constraints are

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

27

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

If rules and constraints are not considered by the SysOps team, services
may need to raise alerts or log appropriate messages warning about
microservice may have to shut down if the mandatory rule is not
respected at deployment.

9. Prefer Polyglot Over Single Stack

One advantage of using microservices is the ability to choose the best of
breed OS, languages, runtimes and libraries. For example, the chat
microservice can be implemented in Node.js, exposing the websockets;
the web API service can be written in Python and Django; the image
manipulation service may be in Java; and the web frontend could be
implemented with Ruby on Rails.
with other services, it can be implemented using the most optimal
technology stack.
possible to mix and match Linux containers with Win32 and .NET
containers.

10. Maintain Independent Revisions and

Build Environments
service independently.
Though each microservice is part of a large, composite application, from a
developer standpoint, it is important to treat each service as an
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

28

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MICROSERVICES

independent unit of code. Each service needs to be versioned and

maintained separately in the source code control system. This makes it
possible to deploy newer versions of services without disrupting the
independent versioning.
each service before rolling out the production version.

Conclusion
older models and patterns. As mentioned before, microservices
architecture has its roots in models like COM, COBRA, EJB and SOA, but
there are still some rules to live by when creating microservices utilizing
current technologies. While the ten best practices weve laid out here are
not entirely comprehensive, they are core strategies for creating,
migrating and managing microservices.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

29

HOW MICROSERVICES
HAVE CHANGED
AND WHY THEY MATTER
by ALEX WILLIAMS

he concept of microservices is fueled by the need to develop apps

such a major theme in 2016.

and how it views the way its business has historically been organized. The
new practices that come with microservices means the need for small
teams that work iteratively in a manner that is unfamiliar to companies
that work in a top-down fashion. This means sweeping changes to how
businesses function.
Now we have the container ecosystem emerging as a core theme for a
new thinking about application architectures and microservices.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

30

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

There are some basic tenets to consider about microservices, noted

For example, monitoring is more critical than ever for companies dealing
with a growing scope of services and stacks. To solve problems,
across potentially ephemeral nodes and across multiple services. This
need to have granular monitoring and better tooling helps practitioners
of microservices that the application depends upon.
So what works? It starts with the organization and the API: A
microservices-based product team and a separate backend-based
platform team with an API between them, where the API calls are made
and the infrastructure responds consistently and accordingly.
Microservices
architecture with bounded context. It allows updates without needing to
understand how everything else works.
Services are built across organizations, and ownership stays in one place.
Microservices architecture serves more as point-to-point calls between
versions, everything still works. That means when building a microservices
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

31

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

and observe and build systems.

IBMs Andrew Hately
check their bank balance once a week. In time, the Internet allowed
people to check their balances, and taking that accessibility further,
smartphones drove, perhaps, the most change. Today, people can get
instant access to every spend on their accounts. That speed and
immediacy means that businesses have to respond with services that are
developed on the same scale that the social networks and search
Businesses have to deal with a constant interaction between their
employees, customers, systems, and all possible combinations

Instrumentation is critical, Hately said.

Code is not supported over hundreds of sites, Hately said. The feedback
comes in and consumers use that in the next set of test cases. This
rigorous development process provides a way to work as a company. It is
also a way to think about microservices. It is the ops side of DevOps that
can microsegment it down to what is succeeding and what is failing.
internal teams, IBM combined best practices from agile, DevOps, lean, and
other iterative processes to create an enterprise methodology called IBM
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

32

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

Bluemix Garage Method. The IBM Bluemix Garage Method combines the
reliability and testability of enterprise solutions with the latest open
repeatable, creating continuous delivery pipelines, and deployment on
cloud platforms. Its a valuable, open resource for anyone to improve their
DevOps skills for individuals, teams and entire organizations, all with
governance-compliant management and monitoring abilities.

these accelerated development processes.

In Docker Compose, the tooling is facilitated by microservices, said Scott
Johnston
developers to describe multicontainer apps in an abstract fashion. It can
describe the web container, database container, load balancer and the
storage implementation.
Matt
Butcher. Some would argue that they are service-oriented architecture
(SOA) done correctly. Developers want usefulness, feature richness and
thing very well. The output of a command is arbitrary with Unix.
Microservices is more contractual in that it shows how to do one thing
very well, but also in how it interacts with an environment. If it works well,
it is similar to what can be done with a good Unix shell script.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

33

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

manifest provides the details about the resources needed, the volume
contract. It tells the developer and the operations professional what to
expect. Its not this medieval style of developer and operations
relationship that forces the developer to throw the code over the wall.
A manifest may contain metadata about an application, plus descriptive
This may be an instance, a pod manifest, a replication controller or a

problem... where you have the

DevOps people who are responsible

production, and you have the
developers who are responsible for
throwing something over the wall.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

34

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

When developers build containers, Butcher said, theres a certain

containers will run much the same way in the production phase as in the
development phase. This already alleviates much of the headaches
among DevOps professionals, who understand the basic instrumentation
of containers. Containerization already provided this assurance level, but
products like Helm, a new service from Engine Yard, could help to
formalize this relationship further, by presenting it from team to team as a
right through it.

From VMs and Monoliths to Containers to

Microservices
Containers provide the foundation for cloud-native architectures and
symbolize a new form of application architecture compared to what
Bryan Cantrill, chief technical
a time when computing was done on much larger machines.
VMs provided a way for the operations teams to manage large monolithic
applications that were morbidly obese, as Cantrill said, and hardware
substrate, carrying the load of the operating system. Containers, however,
have created a new and more agile abstraction.

The app went on a crash diet.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

35

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

Today, the complexity comes with moving from VMs and monoliths to
containers and microservices. Companies struggle with how to make the
infrastructure and the overall organization itself.
The objective of Joyents open source Triton solution is to simplify and
accelerate a companys transition to containers and microservices,
Cantrill said. It allows developers to simplify architectures. You provision
only containers and never provision a virtual machine. You are able to take
the cookbook for microservices and deploy it in seconds, because you
Cantrill said Joyent is a fan of Docker Compose, as it can talk to a single

a full, resilient operating service. This is the big trend, Cantrill said. How
do we uplevel thinking from containers to services?
Kit Colbert, looks at the market from a
perspective of how to move along the container journey. VMware has
been focused on the operations space. It is now developing an approach
to meet the new emergence of developers and their needs, but as an
infrastructure provider.
For VMware, the company sees itself as an infrastructure provider, not an
application-centric, architecturally-oriented company. Colbert sees
customers interested in Cloud Foundry, but others that want a DIY
approach. VMware is seeking to support application technologies with
vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) and Photon platform.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

36

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

To accommodate customers using containers, vSphere Integrated

dynamic resource boundaries. With virtualization, VMware turned

commodity hardware into simple, fungible assets. Likewise, by applying a
Docker endpoint within a virtual machine, vSphere Integrated Containers
create virtual container hosts with completely dynamic boundaries. The
result is an infrastructure supportive of both traditional and
microservices-based applications, with accessibility to both IT and
developers.
native applications. Comprised of a minimal hypervisor and control plane,
Photon Platform is focused on providing speed and scale for
microservices. Photon Platform has also been designed for developer
ease of use via APIs, giving them a self-service platform with which to
provision applications and, ultimately, speed deployment.
From VMwares perspective, operations teams are also pushing to make
deployment faster. Its now more about the digital experience, or how the
view the apps we use on our smartphones. The provider may be known
for the great sound of the speakers, but is the app for the service
functional?
build apps in order to serve the customer, who is continually seeking out
For many customers who have built-out, virtualized infrastructure, they
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

37

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

are looking to meet organizational challenges with the advent of this

faster application development process.

Development in the Time of Microservices

the way the developer works. Developers do not work in the same manner

and not top-down.

impedance mismatch, said Pivotal Principal Technologist Michael Cot.
seem paradoxical, but it does prevent people from trying to understand
how everything works in one giant machine and according to one

attached to one plan.

There is no one way of doing microservices, Cot said. With microservices
you get runtime and architectural resiliency. Microservices build upon
simple principles to build really complex things. The simpler you can
create concepts, the greater the complexity of things you can make.
Pivotal, the platform manages the complexity. It takes away the choices so
the customer does not have to think about the networking, operating
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

38

HOW MICROSERVICES HAVE CHANGED AND WHY THEY MATTER

systems and such. It allows the customer to put the complexity at the top
for the end-user.

Were seeing another renaissance

moment in the technology industry.
Likewise, IBM Bluemix Garage Method aims to abstract the complexity

are adding up to big changes in the enterprise, both on the technical and
cultural levels.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

39

CREATING STANDARDS
FOR THE CONTAINER
ECOSYSTEM
This discussion with Josh Ellithorpe at DockerCon
EU in Barcelona revolves around standardization
within the Docker and container ecosystem, with
a focus on the importance of compatibility with
standardized image formats. Making containers and tooling work
for the entire ecosystem is only possible by controlling
environments and standards, and youll hear more about the
Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Josh Ellithorpe
native who began his career in the late nineties working in all aspects
open source project, Throttled Pro, in 2001. Specializing in Ruby development,
Josh decided to acquaint himself with San Franciscos tech scene, and made
emerging social applications for companies like Facebook and Involver. Hes
now joined Apcera to revisit his networking roots and revolutionize the cloud.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

40

CONTAINERS IN
PRODUCTION, PART I:
CASE STUDIES
by MARK BOYD

hat do music streaming service Spotify, video streaming

company DramaFever, Backend as a Service Provider Built.io,
and the education think-tank Instituto de Investigacion,
Innovacion y Estudios de Posgrado para la Educacion (IIIEPE) have in
common? They all depend on containers to run critical web
infrastructures.

microservice architectures, creating web-scale applications, and running

containers in production.

Running a Global Application at Scale

Spotify has a whole host of features, including logging in with social media
credentials, seeing recommendations based on previously listened to
tracks, and sharing music. But its playing the music itself that is most
important. To keep Spotifys 60 million users happy, the music must keep
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

41

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

streaming even if, say, a developer introduces a bug into the album cover
art feature, or one of its more than 5,000 production servers in its four
To accomplish this, the company packages each discrete feature of Spotify
as a microservice. Containers are then used to allow Spotify to bundle
all the relevant information and display it in the interface that an end user

independently at the same time.

Singh mapped out Spotifys game plan for packaging microservices into a
stream of containers that can be spun up and down, depending on user
needs, around the globe. Singhs talk at DockerCon coincided with the

stage at DevCon in Tel Aviv to provide on-the-ground insights into how

containers are central to the streaming services continuous delivery culture.
Goldin says Spotifys problem was what he calls NxM: You have N services
and you want to deploy them on M hosts, he told the DevCon audience.
The NxM problem refers to the problems at scale that occur when a global
audience of users are all using Spotify in their own ways, turning on and

added, or more users are simultaneously asking for their own app services
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

42

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

to start, Spotify needs to spin up more containers to meet the additional

demand, and then drop them when there isnt the need to maintain
processing power on the server.
To address this, Spotify created the open source project Helios.

We call it a Docker orchestration

framework. It solves one problem,
and it solves it really well, says
Singh. Given a list of hosts and given
a list of services to deploy, it just
deploys them there.
Evgeny Goldin
Containers and the Helios model has been used in production at Spotify
since July 2014, and is a key pillar in their scalability strategy. Were
already at hundreds of machines in production, the team announced in
their Helios README notes on GitHub. But were nowhere near the limit
before the existing architecture would need to be revisited.

DramaFevers Video Demands

DramaFever runs white-label sites such as AMCs SundanceNow Doc Club
and horror streaming site Shudder, and has contracts to deliver its content
to other streaming services. Kromhout, who worked in site reliability at
DramaFever before her recent move to work as a principal technologist for
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

43

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

are not Hulu, but if you watch a Korean drama on Hulu, they are streaming
content they licensed from DramaFever.
During her work at DramaFever, Kromhout took a cattle, not pets
containerized to enable autoscaling up and down. DramaFever started
using Docker in production in October 2013, at version 0.6. Using Docker
enforces consistent development and repeatable deployment; containers
the same, even as they move code from their laptops through to the
cloud-based QA, staging and production environments. The code in the
containers can be trusted every time the architecture autoscales a new
instance of the application or microservices components, as it is going to
have the same operational context as any testing or development
arrangement.

When I started in July 2014, using

Docker in production was a sign
that it would be an exciting place to
work.
Bridget Kromhout
Co-organizer of DevOps Days and co-host
of the podcast Arrested DevOps
One of the initial obstacles DramaFever had to address in autoscaling

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

44

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

situation where multiple containers are launching at the same time.

and launching containers as needed based on usage. What happens is
The registry tended to fall over when around twenty containers were
being started at the same time.
To solve this problem, DramaFever runs the registry container everywhere,
on each host locally, so that the image pull is done locally, with AWS S3
serving as the backing storage.
DramaFever could have gone in the direction of scaling up, Kromhout
says. But she says that Tim Gross, director of operations at DramaFever,
realized that if he had to scale the registry, why not do so in a way that
you would never have to think can our registry server handle this many
image pulls?
that youll face running containers at scale with a self-hosted registry.
Kromhout spoke about DramaFevers container strategy story at OSCON
2015, Docker in Production: Reality, Not Hype.

Managing Containers Via API in

Production
Nishant Patel, CTO of Integration and Backend as a Service (BaaS)
provider Built.io has been using containers in production for almost two

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

45

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

Patel says that for the most part, the majority of IaaS and BaaS customers
are really looking for a database-as-a-service solution with out-of-the-box
authentication and similar features which enable the database to be
provided to end customers as an application. But 20% of their customers
wrapped around the database. Built.ios customers need to be able to
write the custom logic and have it added to built.ios servers.
We didnt want it to get too complicated for our customers to have to set
up their own server, etc. So we wanted an easy way to let our customers
upload their custom code and run it alongside their database. So,
essentially, we wanted a container in the cloud, says Patel.
That led built.ios Mumbai-based engineering team to look at available
options and two years ago, one of their engineers came across Docker
concept and set up these containers, uploaded code and you know what,
we were pretty impressed with what it provided. It was a secure container
that didnt mess with anyone elses code. So then we went a step further
and looked at writing our own management layer.
Patel estimates that built.ios customers spin up thousands of containers
at any given time, as each customers account by default comes with a
Docker container.
It gave us a competitive advantage to go with containers. Our

we were able to create a platform as a service which is something our

competitors couldnt do. It made our story much more powerful. Using
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

46

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

our MBaaS with Docker in production, you can upload full node.js
applications, for example.
Like Spotify and DramaFever, Built.io found existing tools lacking, given
the early adoption nature of their containers-in-production environments.
This led to Built.io choosing to build their own management layer in the
same way that Spotify built their own orchestration service and how
DramaFever built a horizontally scalable host-local Docker registry
architecture.
What we wanted was the ability through APIs is to make an API call to set
higher paid customers to be able to set up bigger containers. We wanted
customers to be able to have a load balancer container, we wanted to add
additional security provisions, and enable through the API to manage
starting and stopping containers, and using an API to get container logs
and put it into our customer management UI.
Patel says built.io continues to keep an eye on the container ecosystem
for other tools that could take over the management layer for them, and
while Deis comes close, for now they have decided to continue doing this
themselves.

Leveraging Containers to Introduce

Continuous Delivery
There is no shortage of those wanting to experiment with using containers
a series of blog

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

47

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

he manages everything from small static HTML sites to full-blown learning

management systems for teachers.

We have 25 web applications, and

most of them are run on Drupal, but
we also use Node.js and Python. The
biggest problem is that we have a lot
of issues when we are moving a web
app from dev to production.
Luis Elizondo
Elizondo was looking for solutions that enabled use of their private cloud
infrastructure that could scale horizontally. They expected their web
applications to grow in both number and usage, so Docker was an
appealing option for infrastructure solutions that could scale with their
intended growth.
At the time, IIIEPE wasnt using continuous delivery methodologies in their
application architecture, so moving to a Docker container infrastructure
also gave them the chance to implement new continuous delivery
Elizondos blog series documented his approach to storage, orchestration,
service discovery and load balancing in production as a way of sharing the
production-ready.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

48

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

The team has two servers. One runs MaestroNG and is responsible for
starting stock Docker containers. The other runs a virtual machine running
Jenkins. We use it as a kind of robot that performs repetitive work, he
says. We programmed Jenkins so that when we push a new change to
any of the projects, Jenkins detects the new change, rebuilds the whole
image, adds the code to the new image, then orders MaestroNG to pull the
Elizondo used the DigitalOcean platform to test the new architecture and
about a month and a half to test it and work out all the kinks.
The biggest discovery in our experiment was that in our containers and in
works for Node.js applications. I also tested it with our Ruby application.

Managing Container Complexity with

Kubernetes in Production
For Elizondo, the solution to containers in production was Docker.
Elizondo says he had experimented with Kubernetes, for example, but
found it too complex for his needs. But for others, such as the core
engineering team at e-commerce giant Zulily, the reverse has been true.
according to Rachael King at the Wall Street Journal. King reports that
part is operating the container, especially in a production environment.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

49

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART I: CASE STUDIES

up shelving their plans for a Docker-based production use case due to the
complexity inherent in orchestration. With the maturing Kubernetes
platform now able to manage orchestration of Docker containers,
however, Zulily has been able to return to their production goals.
Kubernetes is production ready, even for a deployment like ours at Zulily
where were not talking about hundreds of nodes, Reed now says.

Conclusion
At the start of 2015, using containers in production was seen as either an
experiment or a bold choice for enterprise. Now, only twelve months later,
projects, but are being woven into the architectural fabric of an enterprise.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

50

MICROSERVICES
FRAMEWORKS FOR
HANDLING COMPLEXITY
AT SCALE
In this interview, Ken Owens discusses the role of
microservices in developer and operations teams,
and how practices are emerging around
microservices, scheduling, and service discovery
these practices, and the tools theyre using. Ken talks about solving
some of these complexities with Mantl, which serves to help
DevOps teams working with both enterprise and small-scale
applications. Listen on Sound Cloud or Listen on YouTube
Ken Owens
business. He brings a compelling view of technology trends in enterprise IT

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

51

THE DEVELOPERS AND

COMPANIES SHAPING
THE OPEN SOURCE
CONTAINER ECOSYSTEM
by LAWRENCE HECHT

as they build out microservices to be deployed on containers.

fact, when The New Stack surveyed executives of 48 container ecosystem

companies in 2015, 46 said their technologies depended on open source.
Companies are now asking themselves if, and how, they should utilize
these open source projects. If you are an enterprise developer, your
decisions about what microservice functionality to add will likely be based
on your existing infrastructure. If you are a vendor, your technology
choices may be related to your partner relationships. Few people can now
claim that open source projects are inherently anarchic, insecure or not
ready for enterprise-level implementation.
So, how, exactly, can someone evaluate an open source project?

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

52

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

like an open source communitys health, also become more important.

There are many ways to determine if an open source community is
healthy, but the essential factors are governance, the people doing the
work, the organizations providing support, and dependencies on other
projects and technologies. Consistent development activity and
increasing numbers of committers are good signs. Financially speaking,
indication that developers will not abandon the project in the short-term.
Looking at these variables, a developer can better evaluate the risk of a
In Book 1 of this series, The New Stack included 71 open source projects
in its directory. Since then, we have continued to monitor these projects
and have now collected data about 83 projects with 3,910 contributors.
FIG 1: For ongoing study, the median developer is providing two contributions for all

the projects covered. Yet, due to the most active participants, the average number of
total contributions is 53.

Stats for Open Source Projects Covered by The New Stack

31

PROJECTS
HIGHLIGHTED

83

PROJECTS
IN ONGOING STUDY

1,127

COMPANIES
HIGHLIGHTED

1,454

COMPANIES
IN ONGOING STUDY

2,800

CONTRIBUTORS
HIGHLIGHTED

3,910

CONTRIBUTORS
IN ONGOING STUDY

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

135,636

CONTRIBUTIONS
HIGHLIGHTED

207,378

CONTRIBUTIONS
IN ONGOING STUDY

53

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

We have chosen to highlight 31 projects in this chapter that relate to the

deployment of container-based microservices.
Most projects have a small group of contributors from only a handful of
companies that contribute code, but in a far more limited way than the
people from the organizations leading the project.
Overall, we will look at three metrics:
Contributions coming from the leading contributors.
Contributions coming from the leading companies.
Contributors coming from the leading companies.
Using these metrics, The New Stack developed a way to rate how leading
companies compare to the total pool of contributors. This provides an
added dimension to create a panoramic view of the project and open it up
to further exploration.
Each variable is given a name and a score. Using this system, three scores
are applied to each open source project that The New Stack has
researched. The scores show the range and depth of the project according

leadership position and the developers that are making commits.

The Animal Factors

We present these three variables as factors that represent the

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

54

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

methodologies, and one an original research product from The New

Stack. We think these three factors together represent a holistic view of an
open source project, a combined view that we call the Animal Factor
Index. The three animal factors are:

Pony Factor
as the Pony Factor
contributors whose total number of contributions constitute the
majority of the codebase. A project with a low Pony Factor gets most of its
contributions from just a few people, whereas a project with a high Pony
Factor has a larger number of contributors.

Elephant Factor
The second measure of diversity has been termed the Elephant Factor
by open source, community metrics company Bitergia. For each project,
companies whose total contributions
from their employees constitutes the majority of the contributions. A
project with a low Elephant Factor gets most of its contributions from just
a few companies, whereas a project with a high Elephant Factor has a
larger number of companies contributing to the codebase.

Whale Factor
something that we will henceforth call the Whale Factor. For each project,
companies whose employees constitute a
majority of the projects contributors. A project with a low Whale Factor
gets most of its contributors from just a few companies; whereas a project
with a high Whale Factor gets more of its contributors from a larger
number of companies.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

55

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

The Animal Factor Index

Looking at these three factors together produces a holistic view of open
and allows for further conclusions to be made about individual projects.
factors (Pony and Elephant) to the additional dimension added by the
Whale Factor. We believe that this added layer of depth reveals that many
Regardless, it allows greater distinction between open source projects
and how we view them.

The Animal Factor Index of Projects Researched

Project Name

Pony Factor

Elephant Factor

Whale Factor

# of contributors whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributors
constitute a majority

appc Spec

11

Aurora

Brooklyn

Chronos

21

Cloud Foundry Release

23

Crate

Deis

51

Docker

88

Docker Engine for

SmartDataCenter

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

56

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

The Animal Factor Index of Projects Researched

Project Name

Pony Factor

Elephant Factor

Whale Factor

# of contributors whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributors
constitute a majority

etcd

30

Flannel

Fleet

Flocker

Kubernetes

12

33

LXD

12

Mantl.io

12

Marathon

40

Mesos

25

OpenStack Magnum

10

Pachyderm

Packer

141

Photon

Powerstrip

Project Calico Docker

Rancher

rkt

19

runC

15

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

57

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

The Animal Factor Index of Projects Researched

Project Name

Pony Factor

Elephant Factor

Whale Factor

# of contributors whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributions
constitute a majority

# of companies whose
combined contributors
constitute a majority

Serviced

Tsuru

Vagrant

163

Weave

FIG 2: Although projects usually get most of their contributions from employees of

a measure of how many other companies are represented through contributors.

We encourage readers to view the public data set. Feel free to leave
comments and utilize the data weve collected. Our primary goal in
creating the Whale Factor, and referring to the three factors together as
the Animal Factor Index, is to inspire others to pursue additional lines of
research and investigation.

Data Collection Methodology

Data about project contributors was collected using a tool called
Blockspring that accessed the GitHub API to pull information about
repositories, The New Stack chose to focus on the primary repository for
each. Data for 70 projects was collected in late August 2015, with the
contributor information for the other 13 projects being collected or
updated in November, December and January.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

58

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

information as follows: The New Stack used company domain names that
contributors provided Gmail addresses or no email address at all, we used
other means to identify their employers name and username across
several social networks and databases. Clearbit and FullContact APIs
were also used to collect information.
Blockspring, for instance, has an algorithm that cross-checks a persons
email address. While none of these methods are perfect, they were
accurate a vast majority of the time. For those people that still did not
have company information, every personal website that was provided was
reviewed. Additionally, if a real username was provided, a search for the
and other information was similar to what was included on their GitHub
contributors, which account for 93 percent of contributions.
GitHubs own dashboards, because of how we counted contributions from
merged repositories and those handled by bots.

The Contributors
The heart and soul of open source is its people. Believers in the great
man view of history will want to start by looking at a projects
contributors. No credible discussion of Linux can avoid Linus Torvalds and
no analysis of container-based open source projects can ignore Solomon
Hykes. As the heart and soul of a project, core contributors are a reason
projects succeed or fail.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

59

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Using data pulled from GitHub, we can track the number of commits and
lines of code submitted, yet tracking those raw numbers fails to measure
how important those contributions are. The context of these contributions,
along with the dynamics of ticket resolution, can show how healthy
relationships are within the community.
to look at their relationships with other developers, place of employment
contributed to the greatest number of projects among the 83 projects
being investigated (see Figure 2), but it is beyond the scope of this chapter
to do a comprehensive social network analysis. Unseen in the table
projects. Reasons why they are involved in the same projects include
have already established a good working relationship.

Developers With 700+ Contributions to at least 4 of 83 Projects

Contributor
(# of Projects)

Brandon Philips CoreOS

(11)

Jonathan Boulle CoreOS

(9)
Jonathan
Rudenberg
(7)
Brian Waldon
(7)

# of
Contributions

Employer Project Names

/coreos/etcd
/coreos/rkt
/appc/spec

/docker/docker
/opencontainers/specs

/coreos/rkt

/coreos/etcd
/apache/aurora
/opencontainers/specs

/appc/spec

/kubernetes/kubernetes

/docker/docker
/opencontainers/runc
CoreOS

/coreos/etcd

/coreos/rkt
/kubernetes/kubernetes

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

/opencontainers/runc

915

/docker/swarm

/kubernetes/kubernetes
/docker/docker

2019

/docker/swarm
/opencontainers/specs

2488

/appc/spec

1941

60

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Developers With 700+ Contributions to at least 4 of 83 Projects

Contributor
(# of Projects)

# of
Contributions

Employer Project Names

Jessie Frazelle
(7)

Docker

/docker/docker
/docker/notary
/opencontainers/runc

/docker/docker-benchsecurity

/docker/compose

Michael Crosby
(6)

Docker

/docker/docker
/opencontainers/runc

/opencontainers/specs
/docker/docker-benchsecurity

/mesosphere/marathon

Sven Dowideit
(6)

Docker

/docker/docker
/docker/machine

/docker/swarm
/kitematic/kitematic

/docker/compose
/opencontainers/runc

Victor Vieux
(5)

Docker

/docker/docker
/docker/swarm

/opencontainers/runc

Alexander
Morozov
(5)

Docker

Tianon Gravi
(5)

InfoSiftr

Francisco Souza
(4)

/docker/machine

900

2261

700
2123

/docker/docker

/opencontainers/runc
/opencontainers/specs

918

/docker/docker
/docker/boot2docker

/opencontainers/runc
/docker/swarm

/docker/machine

/tsuru/tsuru
/docker/docker

/kubernetes/kubernetes

pachyderm/pachyderm

4714

/opencontainers/runc

1500

847

Solomon Hykes
(4)

Docker

/docker/docker
/docker/swarm

Evan Hazlett
(4)

Docker

/docker/machine
/shipyard/shipyard

/docker/docker

/docker/boot2docker

1479

Victor Marmol
(4)

/kubernetes/kubernetes

/opencontainers/runc

/docker/docker

1288

Matthew Fisher
(4)
Yard

/deis/deis
/docker/swarm

Clayton
Coleman
(4)

Red Hat

/kubernetes/kubernetes

Lewis Marshall
(4)

UK Home

1222
/docker/swarm

/docker/docker

/opencontainers/runc

1213

914

FIG 3: Jonathan Rudenberg, Lewis Marshall and Matthew Fisher worked together on

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

61

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

This network of relationships and shared projects is something The New

Stack will look at in the future to help identify the future possibilities of OSS
projects.
Like most open source projects, container-related ones usually have just a
projects listed above in Figure 2, eight had a Pony Factor of one, and nine
had a Pony Factor of two. In other words, over half the projects under
investigation had more than half of their contributions coming from one or
two people. Interestingly, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, both projects
initiated within companies (Pivotal and Google) have high Whale Factors,

The Companies
Just because most of the work and contributions come from just a few
companies does not mean the project is closed source. Technically, that is
projects in this space use the Apache License, Version 2. As we discussed
in How Open Source Communities Power Docker and the
Container Ecosystem and Developing a Methodology for
Analyzing Open Source Communities, governance rules and boards
may also impact how open a project is. Yet, a concentration of power,

necessarily bad. As a general rule, the fewer companies and developers

involved, the more agile the project.
For this chapter we selected 31 prominent open source projects that many
container-related companies and solutions rely on. Immature projects
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

62

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

were excluded because we only reviewed projects with current activity

repositories managed by independent developers and hobbyists are not
part of this analysis. While there is an inherent selection bias in this
approach, in reality this becomes a screening process in which we only
evaluate open source projects that have already been popularized,
whether because of technical merit or sponsorship.
Another similarity we saw was that 90 percent (28 of 31) of the projects
have over half of their contributions coming from employees of just one
company. Not surprisingly, Rancher Labs, Pachyderm, Crate.io and
Weaveworks account for 89 percent or more of their eponymously named
projects. Yet, that is just one of several measures of openness regarding a
projects relationship with a company. Another factor is the number of
people participating in a project. In this regard, there is more variation,
with only 26 percent (8 of 31) of projects having a majority of its
contributors coming from one company. Across all these projects, there
are some that started in the open source community, and others that
began as corporate projects which were later opened up.

Contributions From Developers and Associated Companies

Project Name and
# of Contributions

Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

Second Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

OpenStack Magnum

733

IBM

26%

Cisco

13%

runC

1,657

Docker

36%

Red Hat

20%

ServiceD

5,955

Zenoss

41%

Mesos

4,838

Mesosphere

50%

Twitter

22%

Mantl.io

1,659

Asteris

51%

Mesosphere

25%

28%

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

63

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Contributions From Developers and Associated Companies

Project Name and
# of Contributions

Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

Second Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

rkt

1,922

CoreOS

52%

Endocode

29%

Cloud Foundry Release

3,953

Pivotal

53%

IBM

11%

Chronos

766

Mesosphere

55%

Airbnb

11%

Docker

17,116

Docker

58%

Marathon

3,394

Mesosphere

66%

Facebook

11%

Kubernetes

16,622

Google

72%

Red Hat

15%

appc Spec

785

CoreOS

74%

Red Hat

4%

Docker Engine for

SmartDataCenter

628

Joyent

74%

Human API

23%

Packer

4,857

HashiCorp

75%

Powerstrip

76

ClusterHQ

82%

Red Hat

14%

Vagrant

7,465

HashiCorp

83%

PetroFeed

2%

Brooklyn

11,213

Cloudsoft

84%

Deis

4,357

Engine Yard

85%

SOFICOM SpA

3%

Tsuru

9,869

Globo.com

85%

FundedByMe

12%

Flocker

12,472

ClusterHQ

86%

Red Hat

etcd

6,311

CoreOS

87%

Red Hat

5%

Flannel

351

CoreOS

87%

Red Hat

7%

Crate

4,448

Crate.io

89%

Weave

3,172

Weaveworks

89%

VMware

10%

Aurora

2,723

Twitter

90%

CoreOS

3%

LXD

1,855

Canonical

90%

7%

4%

2%

9%

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

6%
64

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Contributions From Developers and Associated Companies

Project Name and
# of Contributions

Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

Second Leading Employer and

% of Contributions

Project Calico Docker

1,339

Metaswitch Networks

91%

Red Hat

1%

Photon

677

VMware

91%

EMC

9%

Pachyderm

1,458

Pachyderm

96%

Dakis

1%

Fleet

2,325

CoreOS

97%

Red Hat

1%

Rancher

640

Rancher Labs

98%

FIG 4: Most projects receive a majority of their contributions from employees of one

company.

As pointed out above, all but three projects receive a majority of their
contributions from employees of one company. OpenStack Magnum and
runC had the lowest concentration of contributions coming from one
company.
If we look past the Elephant Factor, there is more variation regarding the
percentage of contributors employed by a single company. For example,
contributor base. Although many of these developers are only making one
contribution, this is a signal that they are engaged enough in the
community to get their commits accepted. The project with the highest
Whale score was Vagrant, a mainstay of many open source developers.
Although HashiCorp employees make most of the contributions, the
project has open source credibility as evidenced by so many people
buying into the project enough to actually contribute to it.
There are many smaller companies in the ecosystem that are providing

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

65

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Contributors and Associated Companies

Project Name and
# of Contributors

Leading Employer and

% of Contributors

Second Leading Employer and

% of Contributors

Packer

329

HashiCorp

3%

2%

Vagrant

413

Red Hat

3%

Deis

138

Engine Yard

9%

Docker

466

Docker

9%

OpenStack Magnum

62

IBM

10%

8%

runC

127

Docker

12% Red Hat

11%

rkt

75

CoreOS

15%

5%

Mantl.io

41

Cisco

15% Asteris

7%

LXD

33

Canonical

18%

3%

Chronos

78

Mesosphere

18% Airbnb

5%

Kubernetes

425

Google

18% Red Hat

16%

Marathon

141

Mesosphere

20%

1%

Mesos

100

Mesosphere

20% Twitter

6%

etcd

221

Red Hat

21% CoreOS

9%

Fleet

53

CoreOS

25% Red Hat

9%

Flannel

30

CoreOS

27% Red Hat

23%

Brooklyn

47

Cloudsoft

28%

4%

Pachyderm

10

Pachyderm

30%

10%

Aurora

52

Twitter

37%

4%

Tsuru

53

Globo.com

38%

4%

HashiCorp

2%
2%

Red Hat

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

8%

66

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Contributors and Associated Companies

Project Name and
# of Contributors

Leading Employer and

% of Contributors

Second Leading Employer and

% of Contributors

Weave

22

Weaveworks

41%

9%

Powerstrip

ClusterHQ

43% Red Hat

14%

Rancher

16

Rancher Labs

44%

6%

Crate

22

Crate.io

45%

9%

Cloud Foundry Release 179

Pivotal

50% IBM

8%

Flocker

20

ClusterHQ

55%

5%

appc Spec

56

Red Hat

57%

5%

ServiceD

35

Zenoss

57%

6%

Docker Engine for

SmartDataCenter

23

Joyent

65% Human API

9%

Photon

23

VMware

74% EMC

4%

Project Calico Docker

16

Metaswitch
Networks

81% Red Hat

6%

FIG 5:

respectively.

Companies like ClusterHQ, Crate.io and Rancher have products that are
primarily based on open source projects, and each company accounts for
most of their own contributions, as well as contributors.
The Crate project seems to be isolated from other projects. None of the
developers working on it have contributed to any other project we
evaluated. Note that Crate.io is based in Berlin, and Lovely Systems, the
other provider with employees working on the project, is based in Austria.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

67

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Although RancherOS is doing most of the development on their project,

with 7 of 12 contributors working for Rancher, several of those
developers have made contributions to other projects, like Docker
Machine and Flynn.

Docker: The Reason Behind the Whale Factor

Nomenclature
Containers have been around for a long time, but it wasnt until the
contributions to Docker come from Docker, Inc, the corporation employs
only nine percent of the actual people that have contributed to the
project. Similarly, the Open Container Initiatives runC, which itself is
based on Dockers libcontainer, has a broad base of contributors, with
Docker and Red Hat employees accounting for a combined 23 percent.
There are 46 Docker employees that have contributed to 10 of the 31
projects covered in Figure 2. However, outside of Docker and runC, the
other projects each only saw one employee participating. Admittedly,
many Docker repositories are not included in this analysis.

CoreOS: A Driving Force in the Cloud Native

Computing Foundation
At its foundation, Google donated the Kubernetes project the Cloud
Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with the hope that companies and

contributors of these projects, we can make some judgement about how

independent CNCF is. Although Google and CoreOS engineers account for
the lions share of contributions for the aforementioned projects, these
employees account for no more than half of the actual contributors.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

68

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

As long as this broad base of support continues, commercial products like

CoreOS Tectonic and Kismatic can be successful, and other products from
with Kubernetes.
Our sample of 31 projects is over-represented with four CoreOS projects:
projects with 28 CoreOS employees contributing to them. If LinkedIn is
correct and CoreOS only has 43 employees, then 65 percent of its
workforce is involved with these projects. CoreOSs CTO Brandon Philips
appears to be very involved, contributing to 12 of the 31 projects.

Google: Can You Say Kubernetes?

With Kubernetes development coming from within Google, it is not
surprising that 76 of the 90 contributors have been Google based.
project associated with HashiCorp.

Red Hat: The Godfather of Open Source

Provides the Manpower
164 Red Hat employees worked on 16 of the 31 of the projects we looked
at. It was the leading source of contributors to Vagrant, etcd and the appc
Red Hats base of engineers are not just tangentially involved in many of
these projects: in two important container-related projects, runC and
Kubernetes, Red Hat employees accounted for 20 percent and 15 percent
of contributions, respectively. The raw manpower being contributed can
and 47 have worked on etcd.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

69

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Mesosphere: A Favorite of Web-Scale

Companies
Although Mesosphere originated Apaches Mesos and Marathon projects,
only 20 percent of those projects contributors are actually employees. Of

orchestration tools, so it is no surprise that its employees have also been

making the most contributions to Chronos.
Furthermore, developers at Twitter and Facebook are tied to Mesosphere,
as evidenced by them being the second leading source of contributions to
Mesos and Marathon, respectively.

Cisco: Mantl Not Being Dominated By Its

Sponsor
Ciscos Mantl infrastructure has broad-based participation. The leading
source of contributions on this project is Asteris, which is actually a small
collective of developers that are doing work for Cisco. Even considering
this, Cisco and Asteris account for only 22 percent of contributors.
The breadth of companies contributing to the project is proof that their
strategy of actively engaging the open source community is working. As
Mantl continues to mature, there is a possibility that this free, curated
list of microservices will generate interest in Ciscos paid Project
Shipped service.
involved with OpenStack Magnum, an API service that provides availability
to orchestration engines from Docker and Kubernetes.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

70

THE DEVELOPERS AND COMPANIES SHAPING THE OPEN SOURCE...

Areas for Future Research

We want to apply this research methodology to a broader universe of
projects. Those projects may focus on a related topic area like
Another way to expand the scope of the research would be to drill-down
into all the subprojects within a repository, or look at the GitHub
organization as the unit of analysis.
Measuring involvement with a project cannot, by itself, demonstrate a
be related to the speed in which decisions are made, which can be
It would also be interesting to investigate the degree to which company

plugins and subprojects that have been written to provide compatibility

causal relationship between company involvement and decision-making
would help inform a developers decision when choosing a project to
get involved with.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

71

RETHINKING
THE DEVELOPMENT
AND DELIVERY
ENVIRONMENTS
In this podcast, Scott Johnston talks to Alex Williams
delivery prior to Docker, and how large code blocks
took weeks and months to ship. But it wasnt, and
still isnt, just about how fast your team delivers: its also about the
programmable infrastructure thats available. Following the success
servers, Docker helped teams rethink the development environment,
and eased friction in the delivery pipeline. Scott also talks about
containers as a reasonable starting point for microservices and
distributed computing, and how tools like Compose and Universal
Control Plane are looking to elevate the usage of microservices.
Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Scott Johnston is the senior vice president of Product Management
at Docker, responsible for strategy of products and technologies.
marketing, product management, and strategy at Puppet Labs. Before that, he
served in leadership and operational roles in product management,
engineering, business development, and marketing for disruptive companies,

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

72

CONTAINERS IN
PRODUCTION, PART II:
WORKFLOWS
by MARK BOYD

variety of companies are already using containers at scale in

production. In the previous chapter, we looked at how and why
Spotify, DramaFever, Built.io, and the Institute of Investigation,
Innovation and Postgraduate Studies in Education (IIIEPE) use containers.

Building the Application and Managing

Pull Requests
One of the appeals of using containers in production is the capacity to
create a seamless development-to-production environment that may
originate on a developers laptop, and can be moved wholesale to testing
and deployment without errors being introduced due to changes in the
infrastructure environment.
In most production use cases we surveyed, code is stored initially in

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

73

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

Then, images are created and these builds are sent to continuous
integration tooling to continue with testing and merging the new code.

What IIIEPE Uses

Luis Elizondo, lead developer at the Institute of Investigation, Innovation
and Postgraduate Studies in Education, says that, before Docker, moving
apps from development to production was one of their biggest issues.
Now developers build base images and publicly release them to Docker
Hub. All applications have a standard structure, including application, log

that developers dont necessarily need to know about.

What DramaFever Uses

Video streaming site DramaFever uses Python and the Django framework
for their main site and Go for microservices handling functions like image
resizing, player bookmarking, and DRM. In either case, the versioned
deployable artifacts are stored and deployed as container images.
For Bridget Kromhout, former operations engineer at DramaFever, using
containers helped ensure a standard development environment for a
team of developers located around the world. She said that containers
help with the distributed nature of my team. It helps us to have fewer
problems, as it reduces the number of inconsistencies that slow down our
velocity.

What Spotify Uses

At Spotify, developers are encouraged to use Java, ZooKeeper and
VirtualBox on their local machines during builds. Engineers use GitHub to
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

74

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

Bintray to store
container images.

image needs to be built and then tested through various stages of QA. For
many of the application environments using containers in production, this
is done using continuous integration tools, notably Jenkins, to automate
as much of this process as possible.

What IIIEPE Uses

Elizondo is adamant that developers should not be developing outside the
container environment and then building the image for deployment. Let
Jenkins do it for you, he says.
As explained in the previous chapter, IIIEPE has two servers: one running
MaestroNG, which handles stock Docker containers, and another running
Jenkins to automate repetitive tasks.
Jenkins also allows you to have a history of fails to replace your Cron
submission, and I programmed Jenkins so it is running Cron on each of
the applications so you have a log and a history of everything that goes
wrong, Elizondo says.

What DramaFever Uses

Like Elizondo, Kromhout used Jenkins for all container image builds. We
have weekly base builds created, as Python-Django builds can take
forever, she said. So instead, if they have a weekly base build already
created, the time for the continuous integration builds for the
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

75

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

uses FROM www-base. When working locally, devs pull from the master
in GitHub and mount that code into the container theyve docker pulled to
have the latest build environment. Kromhout says this is faster than using
Vagrant. Jenkins just builds the one image for all of the platform, it just
builds and tags one image, she says. It is really nice for consistency.

What Spotify Uses

Goldin says Spotify takes images built in Bintray and then deploys them to
AWS. Helios can then be used for service discovery, but is also pluggable
and Consul.

Orchestration and Management

how containers are connected together is typically referred to as
orchestration. Then there is the need for a scheduling and placement
engine that can decide which hosts those containers should run on. And
declaring the state of services when they are deployed and similar

What IIIEPE Uses

Many of Elizondos potential orchestration choices were curtailed by his
institutions need to choose an open source solution that could also be
used with Drupal, the framework in which many of IIIEPEs web
applications were built. Shortcomings in the feature set also limited
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

76

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

Elizondos choices, although he stitched together features from a number

of options. For example, while Shipyard lacked the capacity to manage
containers automatically, it is useful as a viewer and is used by IIIEPE to
monitor the status of their container and Docker services, to identify when
a container crashes, and to reboot dead containers.
MaestroNG was chosen as their core orchestration tool as it has multidescribe everything. For security precautions, MaestroNG was installed on
a server and is the only service that connects to Docker. Once Jenkins has
where Jenkins then connects to the MaestroNG server using SSH security
protocols, and completes the deployment to production.

What DramaFever Uses

DramaFevers orchestration is currently very simple. Because DramaFever
autoscaling group launching, doing the docker pull to run the necessary

are tagged for staging and then prod via fabric, a Python-based tool. So
the same Docker image that passed QA is what is pushed out into
production (from the distributed private Docker registry).

What Spotify Uses

Orchestration is at the core of why Spotify built and uses Helios. Goldin
says that Helios solves one problem, and solves it really well: essentially
deciding where to spin up container instances across a cloud-clustered
network. While Helios is open source, Spotify also has an internal helper
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

77

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

tool. In order to aid with continuous delivery, Spotify is currently extending

the feature set of Helios to be able to show visualizations of what was
deployed, by whom and where.

Other Alternatives
Built.io
mobile-backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) container architecture. This
management layer uses an API as the main communication channel to
and create larger containers for higher-paying customers.
By using a management layer connected via an API, they can also enable
their customers access to some orchestration and management functions
direct from the built.io products user interface.

Service Discovery and the Load Balancer

The maintenance of applications in production needs service discovery
applications infrastructure. A load balancer then ensures that application
performance of the application in production.What IIIEPE Uses

What IIIEPE Uses

a lot of additional learning. Consul stores the IP, port and state of an
application. When Consul recognizes changes to the application, Elizondo
has established a trigger to create a Consul-template, which in turn can
NGINX as the load balancer, but plans to switch to the more complex
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

78

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

HAProxy. NGINX is great, he says. I know how to solve about 80 percent

of the problems that NGINX throws at you. But NGINX is a web server. It
can act as a load balancer, but is not what it does best.

What DramaFever Uses

Kromhout used a Chef client run via Packer in a Jenkins job to generate
Amazon Machine Images for host instances populated with the necessary
upstart template so that the right Docker images would be pulled and run,

DramaFever to defer the more complex problem of dynamic service

discovery.
We used HAProxy for some database connection pooling, but ELBs +
when you can predict where the containers are launching, she explained.
Of course, that meant our utilization wasnt optimal. Today, Peter
Shannon, the current head of ops at DramaFever, is looking into more
dynamic service discovery options. Application container clustering is how

Tying It All Together

Its too early to codify best practices, but these are a few examples of
emerging methodologies which show what a container production

trivial to deploy code.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

79

CONTAINERS IN PRODUCTION, PART II: WORKFLOWS

emerging ecosystem open source tools. This approach exists alongside

some private workarounds and self-created solutions that address the
individual enterprises application programming languages, data server
infrastructure, security policies and continuous delivery commitments.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

80

THE EVOLUTION
OF ARCHITECTURES AT
CONTAINER-SCALE
In this podcast, Jason McGee talks about how the
monolithic approach to architecture came out of
the service-oriented architecture (SOA)
movement. Now were trying to decompose the
monolith to uncover the complexities of this evolving pattern.
Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Jason McGee
on core foundational cloud services, including containers, microservices,
continuous delivery and operational visibility services.

to scale and what that actually means for

infrastructure technologies, as well as how
containers facilitate a move beyond web scale.
Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Andrew Hately is an IBM distinguished engineer and chief technical

encouraging them to build a better cloud for everyone.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

81

LEVERAGING
CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE
FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR
DEVELOPERS
by VIVEK JUNEJA

ast feedback accelerates decision making and provides more time

for making observations and identifying new directions. Observe,
orient, decide and act (OODA), pioneered by John Boyd, is increas-

framework and turned it into a commodity.

Feedback loops are an

essential ingredient of Agile and
DevOps mindsets.
Feedback loops not only provide immediate results on activities in the
development process, they also instill good habits among developers.
change human
behavior and actions.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

82

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

Stages of the Feedback Loop

distinct stages. It starts with collecting observations, including the

the feedback loop.

This information is then fed into an engine that provides valuable
inferences based on the observations. These inferences avoid the clutter
of raw data and produce practical metrics, including test coverage,
cyclomatic complexity, user preferences and more. This can be termed as
the second stage of the feedback loop.
through the second, are used to create directions. This is the third stage,
wherein each direction is a possible path of calibration and diagnosis. The
directions represent multiple choices for decisions that could be taken
Finally, an action is taken in the fourth stage, depending upon which
decision is selected.The actions taken are then fed back into the loop.
development process, and in the long run, reduces the cost of changes
and emergence of issues.

The most important aspect of the

feedback loop is the time it takes for
each step to complete.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

83

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

The goal is to automate as much as possible in each stage of the

feedback loop. A fast feedback loop is essential to move and produce
that are continuously taken based on current observations and
This article, however, is not an introduction to agile engineering and
continuous delivery, both being pillars of building a fast feedback loop. We
will, instead, be addressing the roadblocks that one faces while creating
and managing the stages of feedback loop.

Integration and Diverse Deployments

One of the major roadblocks to building faster feedback loops is the pain
of integrating and deploying large codebase. A large codebase increases
the cost of compilation, bundling and deploying on an infrastructure. The
run the code can be prohibitive and slow the process. Also, with regards
to diverse deployment environments running on heterogeneous
infrastructure, supporting this diversity can become another issue that
leads to further latencies. All of this adds up to longer decision intervals
and reaction times, both of which are crucial to delivering production-

The Cost of Change

At the heart of a fast feedback loop is reducing the cost of change.
Improving feedback time from minutes to seconds, although seemingly
trivial, can have a large impact on reducing this cost of change. Developers

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

84

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

no change is too big. Facebooks mantra of done is better than perfect

minimizing costs.
As communities and organizations start experimenting with
microservices, they also need a new way to bring the minutes to
seconds change to their feedback loop. Thats where containers come
in. The container ecosystem is promising this change, and ultimately
allowing developers to see their code in action by accelerating all four
stages of the feedback loop.

Hyper-Agile Feedback Loops and

Developer Experience
A hyper-agile feedback loop is one where the transition time from one
stage to the other is minimal and measured in seconds.
Creating a hyper-agile feedback loop is nothing short of an extraordinary
developer experience. Such an experience encourages risk taking,
alternative solutions and a cycle of Kaizen. The easiest way to
understand how the container ecosystem produces this hyper-agile
feedback loop is to be aware of the ecosystem participants and their
contribution to the loop.
We can do this by mapping the container ecosystem to the necessary
aspects of the hyper-agile feedback loop. This feedback loop will typically
involve the following:
1. Quick and Consistent Development Environment Provisioning:
The developer on a team obtains the local test environment and
source code for their development environment. The test environment
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

85

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

is itself a declarative manifest that is used to provision the

environment for the developer. The provisioned environment is a
containerized set of service instances each running independently.
The local test environment contains all the necessary services and
related dependencies for the product.
2. Loosely Coupled Development: The developer changes or adds a
are then run to test the changes. To avoid breaking clients, developers
could also insist on having consumer-driven contracts to validate the
change before publishing.
3. Automated Deployment and Tests: The developer then deploys
this change to the local test environment and triggers the integration
tests for the participating services that use this particular service.
4. Version-Controlled Development Artifacts: Once the changes are
tested with the local test environment, the developer then commits

to the environment manifest and commits the same.

5. Automated Build and Production Release: Committing the code
leads to scheduling a build task on the build and deployment service.
This service only deploys the relevant changed service as a new
service version, instead of replacing the old version, which follows the
principles of canary releasing. The appropriate load balancers are

in the service.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

86

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

6. Migration and Deprovisioning: The new change is then observed

vis-a-vis the older version of the same. If the results are promising,
over the old one. The old version is gracefully retired. If the change is
not promising, then the new service is gracefully deprovisioned, and
The above steps merely scratch the surface of what is possible when
creating a feedback loop for developers. The container ecosystem
provides a rich set of services covering a wide range of capabilities for
developers, and accelerates each of the above steps.

Platforms and Version Control

One of the most interesting aspects of the container ecosystem is the rise
of niche PaaS options, like Tsuru, Giant Swarm and Deis, among others.
Some of these PaaS options are transparent solutions, while others
provide a layer of abstraction in the form of developer-friendly DSLs to
architect and deploy complex applications. With rapid change cycles and
an iterative development process, PaaS solutions like these come in
implementations, like IBM Bluemix, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Apcera
Platform and
, have already geared up for integration with the
Docker and container toolchain.
Most organizations adopting containers for purposes of speeding up
their development process have the inherent need to manage multiple
versions of their services at the same time. This is primarily needed to
support canary releasing and service immutability. The latter is an
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

87

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

interesting proposition, in that it is considered a change to deploy a new

service instead of updating an existing one. This reduces rollback time

The Need for Standardization

To enable fast feedback for changes, it is essential to provide developers
with a template that has all the underpinnings of the various container
ecosystem toolchains, including monitoring, governance and PaaS
integration and solutions.

At the heart of all these concerns

is the idea of standardization.
A project like ZeroToDocker is an initial step towards creating a boilerplate
microservices-based development practices. This allows developers to
invest their time developing and releasing reliable code instead of
managing the complexities of a service-oriented system.
The idea is to have a standardized hello world boilerplate project for

registration and discovery, and integration with container ecosystem

toolsets. This forms the service unit of a microservices system, which can

Reaching Maturity
Despite its roots and vibrant history, the current container ecosystem is
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

88

LEVERAGING CONTAINERS TO PROVIDE FEEDBACK LOOPS FOR DEVELOPERS

still in its infancy, and changing nearly every day. The criteria for creating a
mature platform for fast feedback loops will also, surely, change in the
course of container ecosystem maturation. However, it does already
provide the building blocks for creating a hyper-agile feedback loop, which

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

89

A HISTORICAL
PERSPECTIVE AND THE
FUTURE OF CONTAINERS
In this podcast, Bryan Cantrill starts with a broad
history of how technologies, such as AJAX, JSON,
COBRA and SOA, contributed to the rise of the
monolith. And from this historical perspective, he
the word itself. A very similar situation happened with containers
and technologies like jails, FreeBSD and Solaris Zones. But whereas
containers in the past were used to support very large applications,
(microservices). Bryan goes on to talk about the history of legacy
creating optimal development environments for microservices.
Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Bryan Cantrill
platforms. Prior to joining Joyent, Bryan served as a distinguished engineer at
In particular, he codesigned and implemented DTrace, a framework for
dynamic instrumentation of production systems. Bryan also cofounded the
Fishworks group at Sun, where he designed and implemented the DTrace-

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

90

HOW CONTAINERS
AND MICROSERVICES
WORK TOGETHER
TO ENABLE AGILITY
by ALEX WILLIAMS

the system of record. Today, the emergence of an application-centric approach is causing many to rethink that view, placing the application

These projects serve as the core to a new stack economy, and they are the
underlying foundation for automated, programmable infrastructure.

server sprawl proliferated. Virtualization brought relief, allowing servers to

started to look at how application development could go faster, especially

as the Internet became more widely available.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

91

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

Virtualization was not meant to speed application development, nor was

it intended as a way to build real-time services. It was an era of complex
systems hardware, with application development processes that were
built on waterfall methodologies. Application development took
execution processes.
the premise that the application has components communicate over a
network. Today, SOA can be considered a precursor to microservices.
IBMs Jason McGee said at DockerCon EU 2015 that SOA missed

it missed how to encompass the delivery lifecycle.

Today, with microservices, we see the decomposition happening and the
teams getting organized accordingly. Small teams are working on many
little parts. Now there are teams of 5, 10 or 15 people working on parts of
the way monolithic systems were built, McGee said. The interface and
lifecycle were not separated. It kept the approaches of the time. It was
built on Java, with a particular stack on a versioned environment.
Service-oriented strategies are now looked at more holistically. REST and
JSON allow ways for services to work together, independent of how the
team works, McGee said. The model allows the developer to use the
language that makes sense for the task or for the people on the team.
more of a polyglot approach.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

92

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

embodied in the complexities that come with microservices. A tool and

management system is needed around the microservices and containers
that are getting packaged.
other, McGee said. And then there is the monitoring and visibility. How do
you recognize what is happening? It becomes a mapping project. There
are multiple failure points. It gives rise to immutable infrastructure and
speaks to looking at the overall ecosystem more holistically.

Frameworks and Fundamentals in

Microservices
Companies that had to build scalable systems to meet the unpredictable
about this problem, and they turned to frameworks. A de facto
standardization for how services are delivered had evolved from these
systems, McGee observed.
But how does the developer know all the approaches? As it is now,
start again if there is a decision to change the framework. It becomes an
evolutionary problem.
Standardization is key, and groups, such as the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF), aim to pave the way for faster code reuse, improved
and maintainability of applications.
CNCF has a host of member companies on board with this idea, including
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

93

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

Engine Yard, Docker, Google, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Mesosphere, NetApp,

Portworx, Rancher, Red Hat, Twitter, VMware, Weaveworks and more.
CNCF is looking at the orchestration level, followed by the integration of
approach. At the CoreOS Tectonic Summit in New York, Google product
manager Craig McLuckie
project
managing containers.
From Googles point of view, container-based architectures will have to be
the standard for companies needing to build scaled-out systems and
services. The microservices approach served as the foundation for what
we are starting to call cloud-native computing. By breaking the
application into containers, small teams can specialize and become
accomplished in simple, clear ways.

also makes it easier to upgrade components without taking down the

application as a whole.
As businesses increasingly tie their products, services and devices to the
Internet, more data will be generated and, with it, new ways to use it. That,
in turn, will mean new thinking about how applications are developed.
of what those frameworks do. That means the need, for example, to
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

94

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

a way for more nuances, or semantics, to build directly into the

architecture itself.
Mantl is an open source framework Cisco has developed with the Mesos
by Hashiworks. Its representative of the frameworks that are emerging
from Kubernetes, Mesos and the numerous open source projects that
support the microservices ecosystem.
Mantl uses tools that are industry-standard in the DevOps community,
including Marathon, Mesos, Kubernetes, Docker and Vault. Each layer of
managing Mesos or Kubernetes clusters during a peak workload, or
starting new VMs with Terraform. Whether you are scaling up by adding
new VMs in preparation for launch, or deploying multiple nodes on a
cluster, Mantl allows the developer to work with every piece of a
DevOps stack in a central location, without backtracking to debug or
recompile code to ensure that the microservices the developer needs
will function when needed.
The obstacles on the journey to simplify IT systems through automation
are familiar, Ciscos Ken Owens noted. How do you connect disparate
systems? How do you deal with information security policies around data
security and governance? This is where containers enter the picture.
Containers have allowed developers and infrastructure teams to work
together on internal, test and developer environments.
There is a major misconception that monoliths cant be broken into
containers or be cloud native. From an application architecture point of
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

95

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

view, there are monoliths and there will be monoliths for some time.
You cant take a monolithic ticketing system and containerize it today,
Owens said. But there are pieces of the app, such as DNS services,
containerized.
The scheduler is the most important part of the system when considering
how microservices are used. From Owens perspective, the most standard
schedulers are focused around Mesos with Zookeeper and Marathon.
schedulers.
There are two aspects to schedulers: the functioning of scheduling the
of three control nodes per set of six main service nodes. This provides a
This speaks to the conversation we will hear in the year ahead about this
emerging microservices layer and how you orchestrate services, the
schedulers, the control plane underneath, and how they all connect
together. It is, in essence, a new stack of orchestration that puts an emphasis
on matters, such as application portability and self-organized containers.

Addressing Security and Containers in

the Enterprise
Creating their own container allows customers to write around one
standard container. Customers get the tools they need for multi-tenant
environments, allowing them to control complex topologies across public
cloud services and on-premises environments.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

96

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

Apcera is a platform for enterprises to deploy containers with security

and policy enhancements included. It is all automated in the packaging
phase, and there are granular controls over components, such as
network policy and resource allocations, so that the customer has a
general understanding of their clusters security footprint noted Apceras
Josh Ellithorpe.
capabilities to guarantee data integrity. For example, Apcera technology

which focuses on resource allocation, network controls, scheduling

policies and authorizations. This gets to the heart of how semantics
describe the fundamental business rules and how the application is
deployed for the organization.
A Docker image has multiple layers. Apcera detects the framework and
calls into a package manager that has a tag system to describe
accurate look at what is there. Audit logs are captured for everything for
complete understanding. The developer spends less time thinking about
what dependencies are needed.
Their whole idea is to inject transparent security into the process so that it
is invisible to the developer. The developer just connects to a database,
but they do not see the policy enforcement in action. The industry is now
realizing that the policy itself needs a common grammar. Apcera is now, in
turn, making the grammar openly available.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

97

HOW CONTAINERS AND MICROSERVICES WORK TOGETHER TO ENABLE...

Conclusion
come with distributed services. There needs to be a tool and
management system around the microservices and the containers that
are getting packaged. The roots of todays microservices platforms and
once knew as service-oriented architectures.
The emergence of microservices can be viewed as an evolution of the
to scale-out programmable and dynamic services that served millions of
users. Today, the approach developed by these pioneers is the foundation
are now the heart and soul of their entire organization.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

98

WHAT DOES IT
MEAN TO
BE CLOUD NATIVE?
In this podcast, Michael Cot talks about using the
cloud native moniker to describe three primary
principles: utilizing microservices architectural
patterns, implementing a DevOps approach to
running production systems and development environments, and
delivery. Cot goes on to elaborate more on each of these cloudnative principles and what it means to address them. He also talks
about how Pivotal Cloud Foundry has all the tools and services on
their platform to meet and exceed the needs of cloud-native
businesses. Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube
Michael Cot works at Pivotal in technical marketing. Hes been an
industry analyst at 451 Research and RedMonk, worked in corporate
programmer for a decade before all that. He blogs and podcasts at
is @cote on Twitter.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

and

99

THE ROLE OF
PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE
IN THE CONTAINER ERA
by SUSAN HALL

ontainers and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) systems have long

depended on Linux Containers. And, of course, Docker was

created at dotCloud to help it run its own service, making the connection
between PaaS and the emergent container ecosystem a direct one.
Containers made PaaS possible, and PaaS put containers on the map,
enabling much of todays most popular technology.
Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera, and one of the original creators of
Cloud Foundry at VMware before it was spun-out as part of Pivotal. As he
explains it, the original idea behind PaaS is that you simply hand your app
to the PaaS system, and it takes care of everything else you need for a

to reach production, it may remove the need for a traditional PaaS.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

100

THE ROLE OF PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE IN THE CONTAINER ERA

production environments.

The Real Value of PaaS

If you accept that the primary purpose of a PaaS is to make it easier for
relevancy is easily assuaged. Pivotal Senior Director of Technology Andrew
says its also an important part of how applications are managed in
production.

If youve got one container, what

are you going to do with it? Youve
it, how to monitor it, a bunch of
other things. And as you build those
things out or use components to do
it, it starts to look suspiciously like a
platform.
technology at Pivotal
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

101

THE ROLE OF PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE IN THE CONTAINER ERA

Jonathan Baier, senior cloud architect at the New York City-based

consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, agrees. The value is around
orchestration, around management, he says. Once youve got
containers, you need something to help you manage them. Managing
communication between them, managing the failures, managing the
change, all that churn, theres this operations side to it, and thats where
PaaS [vendors] are trying to add value.
To that end, the Cloud Foundry team created Lattice, a tool for creating
and managing clusters of containers. And thats certainly the direction
Red Hat is heading as well. The company has been working with Googles
open source container management system, Kubernetes, and others on
company is also including build automation and support for automating
rolling deployment.
In the Docker world, the container is an image, Joe Fernandes, director

you have to rebuild the container to make those changes. So were

Wheres All This Going?

BuildFax founder and CTO Joe Emison sees all of this as part of a
continuous evolution towards giving developers more control over their
made it possible for developers to create new development environments
without having to wait for the IT department to set up physical machines
for them. Cloud computing made things even easier by removing the need
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

102

THE ROLE OF PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE IN THE CONTAINER ERA

to own physical servers altogether. Things like PaaS, containers and

ITs involvement with application deployment. But he thinks theres more

work to be done on the management side.
Collison agrees, saying PaaS vendors should now focus on making it easier
to deploy secure and safe workloads. He says that the biggest threat to
established PaaS vendors will be infrastructure-as-a-service systems
creeping up the stack as they provide new tools to handle tasks like
provisioning, managing and monitoring applications.
All of this change is surely stressful to virtual machine or PaaS vendors, but
for developers, and the companies that employ them, all of this is good

Meanwhile, even though Docker is only two years old, Collison is already
thinking about what comes next. The virtualization wave has been a
10-plus year journey, he says.

When you get something new, the

lifetime of the successor is always
shorter. So containers lifetimes
might be two to four years max, and
were already two years in.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

103

THE ROLE OF PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE IN THE CONTAINER ERA

Looking at the overall evolution of IT towards lighter and faster solutions

for developers, Collison thinks we can make some general forecasts as to
where were heading. Its things like micro-task virtualization and security
constructs that are being driven out of chips themselves, he says.
Whatever the case, the one thing everyone agrees on is that things will
keep changing. With these cycles we saw this with NoSQL a few years
things, then some of those consolidate, then collapse back into a new
steady state. Right now I think were in a state where were going to see a
proliferation of solutions.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

104

INTEGRATING
CONTAINERS
ALLOWS BUSINESSES
TO MOVE FASTER
In this podcast, Kit Colbert discusses how IT
container technologies. Containers present an
opportunity for businesses to move faster and
present greater value to their customers, and it depends heavily on
how you integrate the rest of your tooling with these technologies.

their products. Listen on SoundCloud or Listen on YouTube

Kit Colbert is vice president & general manager,

engineer for Workspace Portal, and the lead management architect for the
vRealize Operations Suite. At the start of his career, he was the technical lead
behind the creation, development and delivery of the vMotion and Storage
vMotion features in vSphere.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

105

ACHIEVING INNOVATION
AND AGILITY
WITH CLOUD-NATIVE
APPLICATION
ARCHITECTURES
by SAM CHARRINGTON, FOUNDER AND PRINCIPAL ANALYST,
CLOUDPULSE STRATEGIES

hile most enterprises have deployed one or more workloads

to public or private clouds, far fewer have embraced the

harness the power of cloud computing. This is unfortunate, because truly

migrating existing environments or applications to the cloud.
of IT. What does it really mean to achieve agility with cloud computing?
Agility gives the enterprise the ability to out-innovate its competition. And,
as technology both raises the bar for competition and lowers barriers to
innovation, those enterprises that fail to out-innovate will themselves be
out-innovated into oblivion.
Industry data suggests that an increasing number of enterprise IT
organizations are retooling to better enable agility. According to research
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

106

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

conducted by Daryl Plummer, vice president and Gartner Fellow, 45

percent of CIOs state their organizations currently support a second,
faster, more agile mode of operation. Gartner expects 75 percent of IT
organizations to support what they call Bimodal IT by 2017.
loops into product and service development, ensuring that they are
continuously and rapidly improved. By way of example, Facebook pushes
new code to production twice per day, and Amazon has reported making
changes to production every 11.6 seconds.
Of course, these are not new ideas. That rapid iteration and feedback are
necessary for continuous improvement is a notion familiar to most
Kaizen, Lean and Six Sigma. And many enterprises are adopting agile
ideas to IT.
While there is no single technical magic bullet, momentum is building
around a set of technologies and approaches that enable this kind of
rapid iteration:
Microservices
Containers
Container-based application platforms, like PaaS
Through embracing microservices, containers and platforms for
continuous delivery, enterprises can fully tap into the transformative
power of cloud-native applications and, in so doing, dramatically enhance
innovation and competitiveness.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

107

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Key Enablers of Agile Cloud-Native

Applications
One mistake we hear is thinking of these things as new technologies.
Rather, microservices, containers and container-based application
platforms are complementary new twists on established ideas that have,
together, emerged as a key enabler of agility for modern, cloud-native
applications (Figure 1).
To better understand these ideas and how they can be combined to
enable a more innovative enterprise, we will explore each of them in turn.

Microservices
microservices is easier said than done.
In their article on the topic, James Lewis and Martin Fowler describe the
microservice architectural style as:

... An approach to developing a single application as a suite of

small services, each running in its own process and communicating
services are built around business capabilities and are independently
deployable by fully automated deployment machinery.
unpack within it:
An approach: As stated previously, microservices is an approach, not
sell you microservices as a stand-alone tool, proceed carefully.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

108

The Evolution of Application Architecture and Deployment

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

LEGACY

TRANSITIONAL

CURRENT

APPLICATION
ARCHITECTURE

Monolithic

REST, SOA,
Object-oriented
programming

Microservices

DEPLOYMENT
ENVIRONMENT

Physical machines

Virtual machines

Containers

DEPLOYMENT
APPROACH

Waterfall, manual
deployment

Continuous int.,
deployment
automation

Continuous
delivery, cloud
platforms

Source: CloudPulse Strategies, LLC.

FIG 1: The previous names of strategies, models and patterns that are sometimes

thought of as new infrastructure technologies.

Small services: While it can be counter-productive to prescribe

matters since the size of your services will generally be a good proxy
for how tightly focused they are.
Opinions vary widely as to how small is small enough. One blogger,
James Hughes, cites a consensus between 10 and 100 lines of code.
One company thats been using microservices for years used a

there is such a thing as too small. The nanoservice anti-pattern is

used to describe scenarios where services are made so granular that
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

109

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

maintenance, network and other overhead outweighs the utility of

the service.
Own process: That microservices run in their own process is
important so as to distinguish them from object-oriented
programming (OOP), components, frameworks and other related ideas
focused on the separation of concerns within an application.
Built around business capabilities: Melvyn Conway observed in
1967 that organizations which design systems ... are constrained to
produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of
these organizations, an adage that has come to be known as
Conways Law. One unfortunate implication of Conways Law for many
To turn Conways Law in their favor, some companies are organizing
application development and delivery around microservices. At these
companies, microservices are built and maintained by cross-functional
teams that have full ownership of the service and all its dependencies,
and in some cases are independently responsible for keeping the
service up and running. The resulting teams are in a much better
business concepts, not organizational charts.
Independently deployable: As well see in a later section, the
vertical integration of individual microservices makes them
deployable and maintainable independent of the other services that
comprise the application. It also gives microservices teams a
they use.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

110

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Why Microservices?
The microservices approach yields numerous important business and

constraints provided by a microservices architecture.

Microservices architectures excel at helping organizations achieve:

With traditional monolithic

applications, even the slightest changes trigger deploys of the entire
application or large pieces of it. As a result, changes to the application
are batched into large releases or version updates, creating greater risk
and increasing downtime for users.

Faster and easier deployment: Small services are faster and easier
to deploy than large, monolithic applications, and deployments are
easier to validate, again reducing risk.
Easier scaling: Independent microservices running in their own
processes need not necessarily run on their own hardware but are
scaling. In the same manner, microservices allow application
CPU intensive) to be more easily deployed in their optimal
environments than with monolithic applications.
Easier code maintenance: Maintaining a collection of microservices
each responsible for one thing is much easier than maintaining a
monolithic application. This is in large part due to the fact that each of
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

111

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

the microservices can be more easily understood and has a well-

services with limited scope are easier to debug than large monolithic
applications.
Freedom to use the right tool for the job: Because each
microservice is developed, runs and is maintained independently,
technologies it feels will best enable it to meet the needs of the
service. This means that in the same application, one microservice
might use a JVM-based language and a NoSQL datastore while
another uses Node.js and a relational database.
Reduced technical debt: With individual microservices that are
easily rewritten or refactored without impacting the larger application,
large technical debt.
Greater team ownership: Self-contained services allow teams to
take greater responsibility for their design and operation, promoting
greater pride of ownership.
Rapid engineer onboarding: Similarly, a new engineer joining an
existing microservices team can gain an understanding of the service
rapidly. Many companies using microservices and continuous
deployment pride themselves on achieving day-one productivity for
new engineers.
Greater resilience: Because microservices are operated
independently, greater emphasis is placed on monitoring their ongoing
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

112

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

operation than is typically the case with components in monolithic

applications, leading to greater visibility and resilience in
microservices-based architectures.
And, while building resilience into the consumers of microservices
represents additional work and complexity for their users, the fact that
this work cannot be avoided promotes a much higher degree of
robustness in the system as a whole.
microservices approach is not without its drawbacks. These can be
broadly categorized as either development or operational challenges.

Development Challenges
Communications issues: One obvious challenge for microservices
architectures lies in inter-service communications, which introduces a
degree of latency that is not present in monolithic applications.
Applications must be engineered to tolerate not just additional
latency, but variable latency, retransmissions and service failure.

With many independent teams in

operation, there is greater potential for reinventing the wheel.
internal tools as open source and promoting their use internally.

Architectural sophistication: Architecturally speaking,

microservices is a form of distributed computing and introduces the
many challenges inherent to that domain; for example, traditional
application.

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

113

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Operational Challenges
Deployment: Many small, independently deployed services increase
applications various versions and promotion levels. As a result, the
management and deployment automation right is very high.
Monitoring: Similarly, the many independent service endpoints that
must be monitored on an ongoing basis can result in an increased
system administration and maintenance burden for organizations
using microservices.
to address, in that the only way to do so is the development of a set of
competencies, processes and practices within the organization that
supports the microservices style of development and architecture.
However, organizations considering or adopting microservices can take
solace in the fact that the operational challenges of microservices, while

great many tools and technologies for easing the burden of managing
large-scale microservices applications. Two of the most important of
these are containers and container-based application platforms.

Containers
To illustrate the nature of the deployment challenges impacting
microservices, consider a single legacy monolithic application that is
being gradually modernized by migrating new and existing functionality to
a more modern microservices-based implementation.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

114

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

A single new feature might consist of 30 individual microservices, whereas

be provisioned and managed (test, stage, prod). The landscape for the
new feature alone consists of nearly 100 distinct environments.
At the same time, each of the microservices projects a given developer is
on may use varying and independent sets of technologies. Developers
need an easy way to manage these distinct development environments,
hopefully without the performance overhead of virtual machines.These

fueled part of the dramatic resurgence of interest in containers within the

technology community.
Whereas hypervisor-based virtualization abstracts the entire physical
machine and provides a way to host independent virtual machine
instances within a single piece of physical hardware, container
technologies do much the same thing, one level higher in the stack.
Container technologies are based on a number of open source
technologies, most predominately Linux Containers (LXC). LXC is an
operating system-level virtualization tool providing an isolated
environment for applications based on features built directly into the
Linux kernel. Tools, like Docker, make LXC and the like easier to use by
formats and support for distributed image repositories.

particularly for microservice deployments:

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

115

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Because containers eliminate the

need to instantiate multiple guest operating systems, they dont
have as much processing overhead as VMs. This means that your
application can get more done with a given set of physical or virtual
servers.

Along the same lines, VM images are

snapshots of the entire virtual machine, including the guest operating
system. This means that they tend to be large, even for simple
applications, and each incremental copy or version of the image
results in more wasted space. The layered nature of popular container

app depends on OS, app v2 depends on app v1) eliminating the

duplication between each.
Faster application deployment and instantiation: Because
milliseconds instead of seconds or minutes. This, plus the fact that
containers are smaller and more easily transmitted across the wire,
enables faster application deployment into production, and smoother

and eliminates annoying thumb-twiddling and forced water cooler

be made more thorough.
Improved isolation: While containers dont provide the full isolation
of a virtual machine, they can simplify running multiple application
stacks or microservices on a single physical or virtual machine.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

116

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Greater portability: With containers, the application and its

dependencies are bundled into a single package that can be run on
any Linux machine and an increasing number of cloud platforms.

Because application containers are

lightweight, they are easily shared. Container tools facilitate this
further by supporting remote image repositories.

For these reasons and more, containers have gained incredible

momentum as an alternative approach to packaging and deploying
applications. Analysts at Forrester Research expect container technologies
to disrupt the virtualization market and drive cloud computing adoption.
While containers do address the overhead of running many small services
within traditional environments, they dont address the operational
challenges and automation needs of large-scale microservices
architectures.
This is where CBAPs come in.

Container-Based Application Platforms

In order to iterate rapidly, we need to streamline the process of developing
feedback, and integrating this feedback into the planning for future
the latter two and, as weve discussed, microservices and containers help

particularly while were increasing the number of moving parts with

microservices and containers? And, even if we havent yet adopted these
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

117

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

resources, greater consistency and less risk?

One proven approach to achieving these objectives is to put in place a
products. This is the role played by container-based application platforms
such as platform-as-a-service systems.

CBAP Requirements
In the emerging microservices and container-centric world, organizations

products are ultimately deployed.

such as:

CBAPs integrate with existing build

and continuous integration tools to seamlessly deploy new code out
to staging and production environments.

Automated deployment: CBAPs interface with infrastructure

management tools to provision servers, network and storage
automatically and on-demand, and deploy containers and other
Automated scale up and down: Applications running on the CBAP
are managed according to policies set by the application owner.
Desired scaling and redundancy levels are passively enforced by the
CBAP.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

118

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

Service discovery: A directory of deployed services is maintained by

the CBAP, allowing other services to more easily consume them.
Centralized logging and monitoring: The CBAP provides a central
logging facility to ease the management of distributed services.
Services are continually monitored and policies allow the CBAP to
remediate issues or to alert operators as needed.
Single point of control: Operators can manage system performance
at scale, from a single pane of glass or command line, and set policies
that span applications, services and infrastructure.
IT organizations thus have in the container-based application platform a
single, coherent environment that:
Supports self-contained microservices teams: By abstracting
application deployment and ops from infrastructure management,
CBAPs help organizations build self-contained microservices teams
without burdening them with low-level infrastructure management
responsibilities.
Eliminates the operational complexity of microservices: By
automating service deployment and simplifying management, CBAPs
help organizations overcome the operational challenges of deploying
and managing microservices at scale.
Reduces the risk of building and maintaining large applications:
Microservices and continuous delivery each serves to reduce the risk
easier to be successful with both.
Supports greater scalability and reliability: CBAPs actively
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

119

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

enforce scalability and redundancy policies for microservices, leading

to better user experience and uptime for applications.
Facilitates portability across infrastructures: Modern, enterpriseoriented CBAPs support a wide choice of on-premises and cloud-

Conclusion
IT organizations are under increasing pressure to enable and drive

words, the real world.

that adopt microservices architectures face numerous development and

operational challenges. Fortunately, though, in containers and containerbased application platforms, there is help.
Container technologies address many of the issues associated with
than hypervisor-based virtual machines, less wasteful packaging than VM
images, and greater portability and simpler deployment relative to
traditional binaries.
automated platform for operationalizing microservices architectures.
APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

120

ACHIEVING INNOVATION AND AGILITY WITH CLOUD-NATIVE...

CBAPs provide a highly automated, highly repeatable linkage between CI

tooling and the deployment environment, while at the same time
Together, microservices, containers and platform-as-a-service solutions

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

121

CHAPTER #: CHAPTER TITLE GOES HERE, IF TOO LONG THEN...

APPLICATIONS
& MICROSERVICES
DIRECTORY

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

122

MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS
Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Languages Targeted

Open Source actionhero.js (N/A)

Open Source Airlift (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Akka (Typesafe)

JVM

Open Source AnyRPC (N/A)

C++, C

Open Source Apollo (Spotify)

JVM

Open Source Baucis (N/A)

Open Source Beego (N/A)

Go

Open Source C++ Micro Services (N/A)

C ++

Open Source Colossus (Tumblr)

JVM

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

123

CONTD: MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source Compojure (N/A)

Languages Targeted
JVM

Open Source Cowboy (Nine Nines)

Open Source Dropwizard (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Duct (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Erlang/OTP (Ericsson)

Open Source Express (IBM)

unopinionated,

web framework

Open Source Finagle (Twitter)

JVM

Open Source Finatra (Twitter)

JVM

Open Source Gen Microservice (N/A)

Open Source Gin (N/A)

Go

Open Source Go kit (N/A)

Go

Open Source Gocraft (N/A)

Go

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

124

CONTD: MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Languages Targeted

Open Source Goji (N/A)

Go

Open Source Gorilla (N/A)

Go

Open Source gRPC (N/A)

Other

Open Source H2 (Hailo)

Go

Open Source Hapi (N/A)

Open Source Jersey (Oracle)

JVM

Open Source Karyon

N/A

Open Source Kite (Koding)

Go

Open Source Koa (N/A)

Open Source Kore (N/A)

C++, C

Open Source Liberator (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Meteor (Meteor)

Open Source Micro (N/A)

Go

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

125

CONTD: MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source Microserver (AOL)

Languages Targeted
JVM

Open Source Mochiweb (N/A)

Open Source Modularity (JUXT)

JVM

Open Source Nameko (N/A)

Open Source Negroni (N/A)

Go

Open Source Orbit (Electronic Arts)

JVM

Open Source Phoenix (DockYard)

Open Source PIGATO (N/A)

Open Source Play (Typesafe)

JVM

Open Source Plug (N/A)

Open Source QBit (N/A)

JVM

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

126

CONTD: MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Languages Targeted

Open Source Ratpack (N/A)

JVM

Open Source RestExpress (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Restify (N/A)

Open Source Restlet Framework (Restlet)

JVM

Open Source Revel (N/A)

Go

Open Source RIBS2 (N/A)

C++, C

Open Source Sails.js (Balderdash)

Open Source Scalatra (N/A)

JVM

Open Source ScaleCube (N/A)

N/A

Open Source Scotty (N/A)

Open Source Seneca (nearForm)

Open Source Skinny Micro (N/A)

JVM

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

127

CONTD: MICROSERVICES FRAMEWORKS

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Languages Targeted

Open Source Spray (Typesafe)

JVM

Open Source Spring Boot (Pivotal Software)

JVM

makes it easy
Open Source Spring Cloud (Pivotal Software)

JVM

based
Open Source StrongLoop LoopBack (IBM)

Open Source System (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Tesla (OTTO)

JVM

Open Source Vert.x (N/A)

JVM

Open Source Vibe.d (Rejected Software)

Open Source Yesod (N/A)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

128

PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES
FOR MICROSERVICES
Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source ActiveMQ (Apache Software Foundation)

API Management (IBM)

around

Open Source Apollo (Apache Software Foundation)

App Monitoring and Analytics (IBM)

Each time the

Open Source Ascoltatori (N/A)

Open Source Baker Street (Datawire)

Open Source Beanstalk (N/A)

Open Source BooPickle (N/A)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

129

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source Camel (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Carbon (Common Sense Education)

Open Source CBOR (N/A)

Open Source Cereal (N/A)

Open Source Cheshire (N/A)

Open Source Chronos (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Consul (HashiCorp)

Open Source Crate (Crate.io)

Open Source Crtauth (Spotify)

Security

Datomic (Cognitect)

Open Source Denominator

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

130

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source Disque (N/A)

Open Source Elliptics (Reverbrain)

Open Source etcd (CoreOS)

Open Source Etch (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Eureka

Open Source Fastjson (Alibaba Group)

Open Source Fenzo

Open Source

json (N/A)

Open Source Fluentd (Treasure Data)

Open Source FST (N/A)

Galaxy (Parallel Universe)

Open Source Geode (Apache Software Foundation)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

131

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source Grafana (N/A)

Open Source Graphite-Web (Common Sense Education)

Open Source Graylog (Graylog)

Open Source HAProxy (N/A)

Open Source Hazelcast (Hazelcast)

Open Source Helix (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Hystrix

Open Source Ignite (Apache Software Foundation)

IronMQ (Iron.io)

Open Source Jackson (N/A)

Open Source Jackson Afterburner (N/A)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

132

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source JSON Web Tokens (JWT)

Capability Type
Security

Open Source Kafka (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Kibana (Elastic)

Open Source Kong (Mashape)

Open Source Kryo (Esoteric Software)

Open Source Logstash (Elastic)

Open Source Manta (Joyent)

Manta is a HTTP-based object store that uses OS containers

on data at

Open Source Marathon (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Mesos (Apache Software Foundation)

Message Hub (IBM)

based on Apache

Open Source MessagePack (N/A)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

133

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source Mitmproxy (N/A)

Open Source Mountebank (ThoughtWorks)

Open Source Nanomsg (N/A)

Open Source NATS (Apcera)

NATS is an open source,
Open Source Nomad (HashiCorp)

Open Source NSQ (N/A)

Open Source OAuth (N/A)

Security

Open Source Onyx (N/A)

Open Source OpenID Connect (OpenID Foundation)

Security

Open Source OpenResty (N/A)

Open Source Pathod (N/A)

Open Source Prometheus (SoundCloud)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

134

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source

Capability Type

(N/A)

Open Source Qpid (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source RabbitMQ Server (Pivotal Software)

Open Source Raft Consensus (N/A)

Open Source Reactive Kafka (SoftwareMill)

Open Source ReactiveX (N/A)

Open Source Reborn (N/A)

Open Source Redisson (N/A)

Open Source Resilient HTTP (N/A)

Open Source Riemann (N/A)

Open Source Saboteur (N/A)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

135

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

SBinary (N/A)

Open Source SCIM (Internet Engineering Task Force)

Security

Open Source Sensu (Sensu)

Sensu Enterprise (Sensu)

Open Source Simian Army

Open Source Simple React (AOL)

Open Source SkyDNS (N/A)

Open Source SmartStack (Airbnb)

Open Source

(Pivotal Software)
in a distributed

Open Source

(Pivotal Software)

Open Source Strongloop API Gateway (IBM)

secures

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

and backend

136

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source Suro

Open Source Tachyon (N/A)

Open Source Tengine (Alibaba Group)

Open Source Thrift (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Trace (RisingStack)

Open Source Tyk (Tyk Technologies)

Open Source Vcr (Relish)

Open Source Vulcand (N/A)

Open Source Wilma (EPAM Systems)

Open Source WireMock (N/A)

Open Source Zabbix (Zabbix)

Open Source ZeroMQ (MQ)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

137

CONTD: PROVISION OF CAPABILITIES FOR MICROSERVICES

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Capability Type

Open Source ZooKeeper (Apache Software Foundation)

Open Source Zuul

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

138

DEPLOYMENT AND
CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)
Open Source Active Deploy (IBM)

Open Source AppVeyor (AppVeyor)

Artifactory (JFrog)

Atlas (HashiCorp)

AWS CodeDeploy (Amazon Web Services)

AWS OpsWorks (Amazon Web Services)

Bamboo (Atlassian)

Bitnami (Bitnami)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

139

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Bluemix (IBM)

Open Source Brooklyn (Apache Software Foundation)

Calm.io (Calm.io)

Open Source Capsule (N/A)

Open Source Centurion (New Relic)

Open Source Chef Delivery (Chef)

Open Source CircleCI (CircleCI)

Open Source Lattice (Cloud Foundry Foundation)

CloudBees Jenkins Platform (CloudBees)

Open Source Cloudbreak (Hortonworks)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

140

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

CloudSlang (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise)

Open Source Codefresh (Codefresh)

Open Source Codenvy (Codenvy)

Codeship (Codeship)

ContainerShip (ContainerShip)

DCHQ (DCHQ)

Decking (Full Fat Finch)

Delivery Pipeline (IBM)

and
one or many
Open Source Distelli (Distelli)

Docker Compose (Docker)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

141

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Docker Machine (Docker)
Docker Machine

Docker hosts

Open Source dockersh (Yelp)

Open Source Drone (Drone.io)

Open Source Dusty (GameChanger Media)

Fabric8 (Red Hat)

Open Source Ferry (N/A)

Open Source Flockport Apps (Flockport)

Open Source Go Continuous Delivery (ThoughtWorks)

Gradle (Gradle)

Open Source Harbormaster (Crane Software)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

142

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source Hook.io (Hook.io)

Hortonworks Data Platform (Hortonworks)

ION-Roller (Gilt)

Open Source Janky (GitHub)

Open Source Jenkins (N/A)

Open Source Kafka Deploy (N/A)

Open Source Lorry (CenturyLink Labs)

Open Source Mantl (Cisco)

Marathon, Mesos,
Open Source nscale (nearForm)

Open Source Otto (HashiCorp)

Open Source Packer (HashiCorp)

Open Source Panamax (CenturyLink Labs)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

143

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Open Source Powerstrip (ClusterHQ)

Open Source Project Shipped (Cisco)

Open Source PureApplication (IBM)

that use automated patterns
container components
runC (Linux Foundation)

Runnable (Runnable)

Open Source Shippable CI/CD (Shippable)

Shippable for OpenShift (Shippable)

ShutIt (N/A)

Spinnaker

Open Source Spoon (Spoon)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

144

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

StackEngine (Oracle)

StackHut (StackHut)

TeamCity (JetBrains)

Open Source Terraform (HashiCorp)

Totem (N/A)

Open Source Travis CI (Travis CI)

Open Source UrbanCode Build (IBM)

It
UrbanCode Deploy (IBM)

UrbanCode Release (IBM)

Vagrant (HashiCorp)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

145

CONTD: DEPLOYMENT AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION

Product/Project (Company or Supporting Org.)

Vamp (Magnetic.io)

Open Source Vault (HashiCorp)

Open Source Vessel (N/A)

Virtuozzo (Odin)

Weave Run (Weaveworks)

Wercker (Wercker)

xDock (Xervmon)

XL Deploy (Xebia Labs)

XL Release (Xebia Labs)

Open Source Zodiac (CenturyLink Labs)

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

146

DISCLOSURES
The following companies mentioned in this ebook are sponsors of The
Intel, New Relic, SAP, Teridion and Weaveworks.
Horse and Elephant icons, by Joao Santos from thenounproject.com, is
licensed under CC BY 3.0 US.
Whale,
, Female Avatar,
designed by Freepik, from

and Coding icons

APPLICATIONS & MICROSERVICES WITH DOCKER & CONTAINERS

147

thenewstack.io