Chapter 1: What is the focus of this episode about DockerCon?
This week on the Tech on Tap podcast, we talk about the Docker Volume plugin and NetApp's Trident Orchestrator with Andrew Sullivan.
He's here.
Who's that guy? Welcome to the Tech on Tap podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Tech On Tap podcast. My name is Justin Parisi. In the studio with me today is none other than Andrew Sullivan. That's right. This is what, two times, three times in a row? Once, twice, three times a Sully. You know, I'm going to break the string here in the near future.
Not present today is Glenn Sizemore, who was on PTO, I guess, you know, work-life balance, saving your family. I don't know, whatever. It's technically spring break here.
Oh, yeah, it is spring break. But I have a three-year-old that doesn't really work for me. So spring break is why Delta was blaming all of the delays that took me an extra 24 hours to get home last week.
Without further ado, let's cue the music here. You ready for this? Yeah. Yeah. This is none other than Chococon. Wait for it. Wait for it.
Hold on.
All right, enough of that. All right. That was Shaka Khan. And the reason why I played that is because it sounds like Docker Khan. And that's coming up soon.
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Chapter 2: What updates are being discussed regarding the NetApp Docker Volume Plugin?
And we have none other than Andrew Sullivan here to talk about it.
That's right. That was a little bit of reminiscing when Kelsey used to help us with Docker Khan. Yes. Every time she would refer to it as Shaka Khan.
Yes. And it's a tribute to Kelsey. Kelsey Cook. Indeed. Pour one out for you. So Andrew is going to Docker Khan. And he's going to tell us a little bit about what he'll be doing there and what Docker Khan is. Oh, not just Andrew is going to Docker Khan. I think we're going to have close to 20 people at Docker Khan. Well, I didn't say that you were the only one.
I'm referring to you because you're the only one in the studio going to it, and I'll be here sipping on coffee and writing TRs and all the fun stuff. Fair enough. But yes, tell us all about who is going to DockerCon and what you'll be doing there.
Yeah, so DockerCon this year is the largest event that we have participated with. Well, the largest DockerCon that we have participated with, as well as being the largest presence that we have had. So DockerCon, as you would expect, continues to grow in size. NetApp is a gold sponsor this year, so we have a booth.
But we also have a full contingent of people from basically all three major storage product lines being there, ranging from marketing people. We can kind of ignore them. Lowly TMEs like myself. We also have product management. We even have a good number of the engineers going. If anybody's listening, if you happen to be at DockerCon, stop by the booth.
You can talk to people like Mr. Jonathan Rippey, the guy who wrote a good chunk of the NDVP code. We'll have a bunch of our other QA and miscellaneous other people there as well.
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Chapter 3: How is DockerCon changing this year compared to previous years?
So fantastic way to meet with those guys, to ask questions, to get clarification. And I would be remiss if I did not talk about our VIP program. where you can come and request a meeting, have meetings with all kinds of people.
Again, least of all myself, but we also have a bunch of directors and other people where you can find out what NetApp is doing, both in the containers space, the containers ecosystem, as well as kind of across the board.
Do you happen to know where your booth will be located? On the expo floor. Just somewhere, just walk around until you find it? Hang on, I can tell you. Slacker.
I know. So where is DockerCon going to be this year? So DockerCon is in Austin this year. Oh, so like last year? No, that was OpenStack Summit. Oh. Aren't they the same thing? No, they are not.
What?
They are similarly timed this year. So next week I will be at DockerCon. The week after that I will be doing customer visits. And then the week after that I will be at Red Hat Summit in Boston. And then the following week, so that's the first week of May, the following week, the second week of May, is OpenStack Summit, also in Boston. So what you're telling me is you're going to not be here.
No, I'm going to see if I can get tickets to visit, like, Sam Adams Brewery or something like that. Yeah, but you're not going to be doing podcasts, I take it. Correct. I told you I was breaking the string. That's good. We'll have an increased quality of podcasts the next few weeks.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of the new naming scheme for NDVP?
Exactly. That's my goal. I'm here to help the overall cause. I appreciate that. So did you find out your booth location? We are in booth G24. All right. G24. Bingo. The map that I have, it is, yes, that is correct. That's the bingo. So the map that I have shows it as being in the back left corner. So back right next to the big Docker booth, actually.
All right. Excellent. You'll be right next to the Docker booth doing some Docker things, containerizing the things, all the things.
All the things. So we'll have lots of socks, right, with the new Code On logo. We'll have lots of stickers.
Are they sockers? Docker sockers? No. No?
No, they're NetApp. They're the NetApp code on socks.
Oh, yeah. Code on, bro. Yeah. Why can't we do code on, bro? That would be awesome.
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Chapter 5: What improvements have been made to the install process of Trident?
Bra. No. All right. So speaking of Docker, Andrew's also here because we couldn't find anybody else this week. Andrew's also here to talk about the Docker volume plug in. We had a new release this week as well as Trident. So, Andrew, if you could tell us a little bit about what's included in the new Docker volume plug in.
I thought I was here because you kicked me off and I was coming back as a guest. Yeah, sure. You've actually been replaced. I won't tell you who. Actually, I'll tell you who. It's actually that that cup. Is it the inanimate carbon rod? It's that cup of coffee that we replaced you with. It has more energy than you. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Yeah, so last week, so the week of the 7th, I believe, the day of the 7th, we released two really, really big things for us. The first one being a new version of NDVP, the NetApp Docker Volume Plugin. So the first thing that you'll notice about the new release is a different naming scheme.
It's still called the NetApp Docker Volume Plugin, but rather than being a version 1, version 2, version 3, it is version 17.04. 17 representing the year, of course. 04 representing the month. So our goal here is to change to, well, a more predictable release cycle. So the expectation is that we'll have quarterly major releases.
So you'll see a 17.06, for example, or 07, depending on when the timing works out. And then we will also have a third identifier in there. So, for example, you may see a 17.04.1.2.3 as time goes on. So those dot-dot releases are either bug fixes or sometimes will be pushing new features into a beta-like status.
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Chapter 6: How does Trident handle storage properties differently now?
But ultimately, particularly if you're doing something like launching NDVP using the managed plugin ecosystem, right, so Docker plugin install, as long as you always use the 17.04 or 17.06 or whatever the next one happens to be, it will always pull the latest of those dot releases.
So in 100 years, you're screwed. I mean, 2117 is going to be a release that you have to just name something entirely different.
You know, nobody would ever need more than 64K of RAM, so I'm going to take that risk. Hey, you take that risk. Things don't change that much over 100 years. I mean, come on. The Y2K bug wasn't a bug. Have you upgraded your cotton gin? I can't look at you straight-faced right now.
So among the other actual improvements, aside from just changing the naming scheme, really the focus with NDVP for this particular release was around consistency. So anybody who is using NDVP across platforms would have noticed that things like, well, specifying the size of the volume was inconsistent. You could specify no unit, and it would produce it in gigabytes.
You could produce, or you could specify a giga or gibby type of unit, so base 10, base 2. With SolidFire, there was no units. It was always base 2 gigabytes, gibby. So what we did was basically standardize all of that, as well as provide the ability to do a default.
So the default default is still one gigabyte, but the administrator can specify that the default, if no size is provided, can be something else as well. So I'm going to dumb it down a little bit.
Let's talk about base 2 versus base 10, because this actually gets confusing for people, because when you start talking about GB and GB, it gets all muddled. So GB is G-I-B, right? Yeah. G little i-b, and then GB is gigabytes. And when you're dealing with base 2 versus base 10, that's 1024 versus 1,000, right?
Correct. Yeah, so most of the time, we as consumers, right, and I'm lumping us as storage administrators and NetApp employees who are hopefully knowledgeable about this already, but anybody who isn't, right, when you go to the store, when you go online and order a laptop or anything like that, maybe you're going to buy a hard drive that is one terabyte in size, right, one trillion bytes.
However, when you actually go to use that drive, it's going to be something like 930 gigabytes of usable space. This is because computers operate in base 2 binary. Marketing operates in base 10. Exactly.
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Chapter 7: What are the new features introduced in the latest Trident release?
Marketing operates in base 10 because it's a bigger number. It is. I get more for less or less for more. So effectively, we standardize the units. The default is now to use the base 2. So if you're using Docker volume plugin, you say Docker volume create with a size of 10, you will get 10 usable gigabytes of space.
Or megabytes or terabytes, whatever unit you specify. Do I have the option to go the other route? Is that an option I can set or is it just always going to be?
You can set it. You can choose anything from bytes all the way up to yottabytes. If you want to request .004 yottabytes of storage. Really? I haven't tested it, but it will probably work. Wow. That's a corner case for sure. Turns out our engineers are thorough. Very thorough.
Thorough.
Very thorough. Docker volume plug-in, anything else? Yeah, so I mentioned defaults, right? We can set the defaults for the volume size if it's not specified. In order to help with really manageability, rate usability, we also gave the administrator the ability to specify any defaults that they want.
Really, the key use case here is something like an export policy with NFS, in that previously, every time you created a volume using NFS, if you wanted to use something other than the default, export policy, here I'm referring to default, the name default export policy, not a default configured export policy.
If you wanted to use any other export policy, you had to specify it with every volume that was created as an option. Now we can specify that in the configuration file for the ndvp instance. So it's very, very easy for all of those volumes that get created to automatically receive that export policy.
Can I do it in little groups?
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Chapter 8: Where can listeners find more information about NDVP and Trident?
So if I have a segment of volumes, I want to have a specific export policy, and then another segment, can I do it that way, or is it all or nothing?
So it's an all or nothing but a per NDVP basis. So since the host can have as many NDVPs running as you want, you can configure each one with a different export policy. So in the case of multi-tenancy, for example, maybe I specify a particular export policy for group one, a different one for group two, a different one for group three, et cetera.
Yeah, this also helps get around issues with access because sometimes people don't like to configure the default policy. They like to leave it empty so that no one can get access. Or they use the default policy just for read-only access to traverse the file system. So if you set all your Docker volumes to the default policy, you would only get read access.
And then everybody's trying to troubleshoot why nothing's working. Exactly.
So this was definitely an important usability improvement. Did you pimp your Docker volume plugin? Little bling?
I don't know what that means. No shiny Chrome?
Wait, wait. Does bling mean additional logging? Yes, it does. Then yes, we did. No, so again, kind of focused on usability enhancements. So just increasing the logging, making it easier to figure out what's going on the behind the scenes to help with troubleshooting, stuff like that. So easy stuff, ultimately, right, for our users to take and just figure out what's going on, right?
If you need help, reach out to us via Slack, via GitHub, right? whatever that method happens to be, and it's super easy to get us that information as well.
All right.
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