DockerCon Europe 2014 in Amsterdam Report

Docker has been celebrating its success quite well. Interesting sessions, good catering, exciting evening event, awesome openminded people.
07.12.2014
Jan Nabbefeld
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After a short news flash from Day one of DockerCon Europe lets have a more in depth look. But first of all please let me emphasis the following:

Every piece of software that has been discussed on DockerCon Europe is in alpha state. I think this is not only my personal feeling instead this opinion is more or less common sense among the audience and participations of the conference. So please keep this in mind when reading this article!

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Having said that DockerCon felt like a roadshow of experimental software trying to find the best suitable way to integrate container technologies into an effective software development circle, being this for automated software testing or even in production (the later can still be assumed as an exception). No enterprise-ready solutions are out there at the moment, everything is rapidly moving in various directions. Docker Inc. itself has asked for user feedback multiple times during the conference to define and align their own roadmap including the all announced components and products like Docker Hub Enterprise, machine, swarm and compose.

There have been a bunch of interesting talks which covered the major painpoints the community is currently facing with Docker and micro services in common. Of course orchestration is one of the most important but by far not the only one. The list of Docker container orchestration tools is quite impressive. A few solution providers took also part in Amsterdam. Projects like Clocker and Mesosphere presented their solution in dedicated sessions. Others like Flocker from ClusterHQ or Tumtum have been there as vendors sponsoring the event. Beside orchestration topics other sessions gave interesting insides like Mitchell Hashimoto from HashiCorp talking about Terraform and Consul. Next to software solutions in the Docker context a few “war stories” have been presented. Bottomline here: it’s not easy, there is no general solution, there are some best practices or tracks you might want to follow, its moving extremely fast, it’s a painful way to production, it’s on everybody’s roadmap 2015.

All in all the whole event was extremely good organized and Docker has been celebrating its success quite well. Interesting sessions, good catering, exciting evening event, awesome openminded people. Sadly we missed the hackathon which kicked off community contribution for machine with multiple new driver like PRs for Rackspace, VMWare, GCE, Exoscale, Concerto and AWS.