Category: Containers

Container of the Week – kaggle/python

Machine Learning is a very popular field at the moment and is something that’s in the news and geek culture a lot.  Kaggle is a machine learning competition site where you can take part in a (usually sponsored) competition to apply your skills and solve a real-world problem. Putting aside the controversial nature of spec work… Continue reading Container of the Week – kaggle/python

Changing a Docker container’s restart policy

While researching another article I discovered that it’s now possible to change the restart policy for a container without stopping, deleting and re-running it. Apparently this has also been possible for quite a long time, since Docker 1.11 was released in April 2016. The docker update command allows you to change the configuration of a container in several… Continue reading Changing a Docker container’s restart policy

Container of the Week: gettyimages/spark

This week we are looking at a container for Apache Spark. Spark is a cluster-computing framework for data processing, in particular MapReduce and more recently machine learning, graph analysis and streaming analytics. Clustered systems are sometimes difficult to run on a single machine, for example a laptop or desktop, as this use case is often not… Continue reading Container of the Week: gettyimages/spark

Docker Base Images

What are base images? Every application running inside a container is built upon a foundation. This foundation is called the base image and supports everything above it. A virtual machine requires an operating system that is used by the application running inside it, and in a similar way a containerized application requires a base image.… Continue reading Docker Base Images

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Analysing Docker Library Images with Bashbrew

I have been doing a bit of work on analysing the Docker official library images using the bashbrew tool. If you are an experienced Go developer then perhaps it’s obvious how to get it working but I had some trouble. Here is a quick introduction to getting the bashbrew tool working.

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Container of the Week – scratch

There’s literally not much to say about the scratch container as it’s completely empty! This container is usually only used when creating a base container from an external root filesystem in combination with the ADD command. A Dockerfile that does this would look like: FROM scratch ADD rootfs.tar / The root filesystem can be created outside… Continue reading Container of the Week – scratch

Container of the Week – busybox

This week we are going to look at a fairly popular container that is often used as a base for larger images – busybox.  We’re also going to look at some of the upsides and downsides of busybox, a somewhat tempestuous project in the free software world.

Do Docker Users Have a Container Size Fetish?

There is a rather unhealthy obsession, in my opinion, in the Docker community about developing the smallest possible container size. Obviously you don’t want your container to contain hundreds of megabytes of useless junk, but perhaps we have passed the point of diminishing returns. It turns out that it is less expensive to have files… Continue reading Do Docker Users Have a Container Size Fetish?

Container of the Week – jenkins

This post is part of a series where we examine a different container image each week.  See previous Containers of the Week here. This week’s image is the official image for the Jenkins project, an open source application for building, deploying and automating software. Running Jenkins inside a container is a simple task, but I’m going to… Continue reading Container of the Week – jenkins