Storage deep dive - with Jérôme Petazzoni and Kai Davenport

Deep dive into Docker storage drivers

Jérôme Petazzoni - Senior Engineer at Docker. Inc.

The first release of Docker only supported AUFS, and AUFS was available (out of the box) only on Debian and Ubuntu kernel. Then Red Hat wanted Docker to run on its distros, and contributed the Device Mapper driver, and later the BTRFS driver, and recently the overlayfs driver.

We will present how those drivers compare from a high-level perspective, explaining their pros and cons. This will help the audience to make more informed decisions when picking the most appropriate driver for their workloads.

Then we will see each driver in action, and look at low-level implementation details. We won't dive into the golang implementation code itself, but we will explain the concepts of each driver. This will help to better understand how they work, and give some hints when it comes to troubleshoot
their behaviour.

About Jérôme Petazzoni:

Jerome is a senior engineer at Docker, where he helps others to containerize all the things. In another life he built and operated Xen clouds when EC2 was just the name of a plane, developed a GIS to deploy fiber interconnects through the French subway, managed commando deployments of large-scale video streaming systems in bandwidth-constrained environments such as conference centers, operated and scaled the dotCloud PAAS, and various other feats of technical wizardry. When annoyed, he threatens to replace things with a very small shell script.

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ClusterHQ's Powerstrip

Kai Davenport - Developer Evangelist - ClusterHQ

Powerstrip is a tool for prototyping Docker extensions. It's a Docker API proxy which allows multiple adapters to hook into the same Docker daemon.

It enables the creation of extensions that are:

composable - it's vital that the variety of tools being developed to extend docker are able to work together.

late-bound - docker a compiled golang binary - extensions need to run outside the main docker process and to be authored in any language.

optional - extensions that solve particular problems should be replaceable with other solutions for the same problem.

Because Powerstrip presents a standard docker HTTP proxy, it can communicate with the standard Docker client. This means the wide range of orchestration tools can be made to work with Powerstrip adapters out of the box.

There are several Powerstrip adapters currently being developed - one for Weave and one for Flocker. We hope to see a wide range of adapters being developed by the docker community in the coming months.
About Kai Davenport: Kai Davenport is a developer evangelist for ClusterHQ, the makers of docker data management tool, Flocker.

He has been developing database driven websites since 1998 and has been hacking on a variety of Docker based projects under his github profile, binocarlos.

Previously working in the education sector, he most recently authored a Powerstrip adapter for Weave - a virtual overlay network for containers.

Kai develops in node/io.js and was working on a proxy server for multiple Docker servers before working on Powerstrip.

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