Thanks for the background, Dav - how are Windows users reacting to all this?
Cheers,
Greg
On 2014-10-26 1:48 PM, Dav Clark wrote:
As Aron suggested, we are actively considering the use of Docker now
at Berkeley. In particular, boot2docker 1.3 has made some nice changes
that allow for easier mapping from inside the inner container all the
way to the host level (though it's still not there yet for port
mapping). I apologize if I was part of the telling you "to get lost"
crowd. I do have a set of concerns that are somewhat articulated
above, but it boils down to the following two use-cases:
1. Having an installation process that relies on familiar and reliable
GUI operations to get started with the new programming environment.
2. Having a more-or-less already configured VM / account for some
users in "the cloud" (where, "the cloud" might be my development
server in D-Lab).
Docker may be useful for (2) now, but I think it's still not worth the
extra work beyond either setting up your own multi-user server, or
simply having a straight-up cloud VM (i.e., not Dockerized, but rather
an EC2 AMI or DigitalOcean droplet, etc.). A lot of /instructors/ are
not necessarily skilled sys-admin / ops types (like me, for example
;). So even though we are insulating our students in (2), we still
should keep things simple for our instructors.
But I agree that Docker is getting to where it's likely to be more
useful than difficult soon, and I certainly don't want to discourage
anyone from exploring how to make that easier! Perhaps it's important
to distinguish between development efforts and current suggestions for
provisioning student environments?
FWIW, the above-mentioned pioneer, Carl Boettiger, has been submitting
changes to the standard VM we're using at Berkeley to show us the way
forward with Docker:
https://github.com/dlab-berkeley/collaboratool/pull/90
We certainly welcome folks to contribute / fork / extend our work
there. We've made strong arguments about why it makes sense to use
Packer as the BASE configuration tool (gloss: it can provision pretty
much anything). But nothing is set in stone.
Shine on, you crazy Dockers,
D
On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 10:07 AM, Aron Ahmadia <a...@ahmadia.net
<mailto:a...@ahmadia.net>> wrote:
Hi Trevor and Greg,
My understanding from interacting with the tmpnb server [live demo
at https://tmpnb.orge] is that it is a zero-install approach. The
installation/maintenance load is reshouldered onto system
administrators, and the users can focus on getting work done.
I think that assumption [1] There's no room in the schedule...,
should probably be [1A There's no room in the schedule] OR [1B The
learners will be working from this cloud infrastructure in the
future]. It looks to me that a number of groups, from the D-Lab
at Berkeley to JuliaBox at MIT, to DIT4C at University of
Melbourne, are moving at full steam on providing this back-end
support.
Does this make sense?
A
On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 4:31 PM, W. Trevor King <wk...@tremily.us
<mailto:wk...@tremily.us>> wrote:
On Sun, Oct 26, 2014 at 12:20:39PM -0400, Greg Wilson wrote:
> 5. The learners are already familiar with Linux, explicitly
want to
> learn it, or it's an authentic task worthy of a lesson in
its own
> right.
Docker is trying to branch out beyond Linux. For example, they're
working with Microsoft on a Docker engine [1] and native
client [2]
for Windows Server. Not that many of our students are likely
to show
up with the server-flavor installed on their laptop, but
still, Docker
is aiming to be a generic deployment framework like existing
virtual
machines, but without bundling kernels. I don't know how many
scientists use Windows Server boxes for their research, but
I'm often
surprised by support for non-free OSes ;).
Cheers,
Trevor
[1]:
http://blog.docker.com/2014/10/docker-microsoft-partner-distributed-applications/
[2]:
http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/10/15/new-windows-server-containers-and-azure-support-for-docker/
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