This year we had the great opportunity to attend to DockerCon EU 2018 at Barcelona with four people. Two of us, Alex and Martin are developers, and Bernhard and I are operators so we did a real DevOps journey! The decision to go with both teams, in terms of DevOps, was the best we ever made and we are very thankful that our company, STRABAG BRVZ supported this idea. In fact, there were a lot of topics which were developer focused and in parallel there were also a lot of breakouts that were more operator focused. So we’ve got the best of both worlds.
We will not write a long summary of all sessions, break outs and workshops we attended as you can find all the sessions already online - videos of all sessions are available here!
Rather we will give you an inside view about a great community.
I am (Mario) a active Docker Community Leader and therefore I got the chance to attend to the Docker Community Leader Summit which took place on Monday afternoon. I came late to the summit because our flight was delayed, but Lisa (Docker Community Manager) reserved a seat for me. Therefore I was only able to bring myself in for the last two hours of the summit, but this was still a huge benefit. You might think that at such summits there are only soft laundered discussions going on, but from my point of view I can tell, that this was not the case. Instead, the discussion was very focused about the pros and the cons on what Docker does expect from the Community Leaders and what the Community Leaders can expect from Docker to retrieve support with their meetups. In short, there will be a new Code of Conduct for the Community Leaders in the near future. The second discussion was about Bevy, the “Meetup” platform where the Docker Meetup pages are created and the Docker Meetups are to be announced. Not all of us are happy with the current community split up situation between bevy.com and meetup.com and we had discussed both sides of the medal. This is obviously a topic we will have to look more at in the next few month and we will see how things progress. Sadly, I had to leave the summit just in time, as Bernhard and I were going to hold a Hallway Track and therefore I missed the Community Leader Summit group photo…
The Hallway Track we did was really fun and impressive. We shared our BosnD project as we think, that a lot of people are still struggling to run more than a handful services in production. There are new load balancer concepts like Traefik out there and there are also service meshes but most of the time people just want to get up and running with the things they already have but in containers and with the many benefits of an orchestrator (like docker swarm). And regarding to our Hallway Track and also referencing the Hallway Track held by Rachid Zarouali (AMA Docker Captains Track) which I attended too, this is still one of the main issues.
The DockerCon party was huge and we had the chance to talk to a lot of people and friends. It was a very nice evening with great food and a large number of discussions. After the DockerCon EU 2017 people said that Docker is dead and that the Docker experiment will be over soon. And yes it was not clear how the Docker Inc. will handle the facing challenges. One year later, after Microsoft bought GitHub and RedHat was swallowed by IBM, Docker Inc. is now on a good course. Of course, they have to run their Enterprise program, they have to earn money, but they are still dedicated to the community and, and this was surprising, to their customers. There were some really cool break outs, like the one from Citizens Bank, which clearly showed, that Docker inc. (the company) is able to handle both, Docker Swarm AND Kubernetes, very well with their Docker EE product.
Well, we will see where this is all going to, but, in our oppinion, Docker Inc currently seems to be vital (look at their growing customer number) and their business model seems to work.