Optimizing Continuous Delivery Part 2, Dockerizing Microservices

What can you learn about Dockerizing microservices?

Sumo Logic has a broad-scale initiative to Dockerize it's service and JFrog's Xray was built from the ground up using Docker. The Sumo Logic engineering team has learned a lot in going through this process of Dockerizing microservices. As Sumo Logic’s Chief Architect, Stefan Zier, explains, "Some of Sumo Logic's microservices have 1,000+ instances of the service running and when we do an upgrade we need to pull 1,000+ in a reasonable amount of time - especially when we’re going to do continuous deployment." In terms of adoption and learning curve.

Stefan suggests:

• Developer Education – Docker is a new and foreign thing and the benefits are not immediately obvious to people.
• Communication – Talking through why it’s important and why it’s going to help and how to use it.
• Workshops – Sumo Logic does hands-on workshops in-house to get its developers comfortable with using Docker.
• Culture – Build a culture around Docker.
• Plan for change – the tool chain is still evolving. You have to anticipate the evolution of the tools and plan for it.

JFrog’s Co-founder and Chief Architect, Fred Simon, then explains how Frog Dockerized their pure SaaS Bintray, which is a distribution hub for all the packages around the world, and how they built their latest product, Xray, from the ground up using Docker.

Other topics on this video include:

• Promoting containers. Why it’s important to promote your containers at each stage in the delivery cycle rather than retag and rebuild.
• Docker Shortcuts – How Sumo Logic is implementing Docker incrementally and taking a hybrid approach versus doing pure Docker.
• Adventures Dockerizing Cassandra
• Distributing Docker Images
• Evolving Conventions for Docker Distribution

See the blog post, for a written summary.

Resources

Video: Optimizing Continuous Integration and Delivery Using Advanced Analytics: Part 1

Blog: JFrog and Sumo Logic’s Top Developers Speak Out on CI/CD, Docker and Microservices