dockerCon EU 2018

I went to DockerCon EU 2018 in Barcelona last week, the conference for containerization strategies with around 1500 participants from all over the world. Barcelona is a cool sunny city adding Docker to it,  it is the dream of every developer, systems admin, architect, IT decision maker. Thanks to WomenWhoCode I got a ticket, thanks to my employer Atrapalo.com I was able to attend.

Docker has become hotter than hot and the de facto standard for containerisation of software. Everyone is on board, and wants a piece of the market on integrating with containerised applications: Redhat, Puppet, Nginx, avi networks, AWS, vmware, sematext are some of the names from the Docker ecosystem, and that were present in the, in my opinion little bit sparse expo hall of the DockerCon.

Keynotes, breakout and networking sessions, hands-on workshops, an expo, hallway track where you can share experiences and learn from others. It was informal and fun, with a lot of networking and a focus on practice. And yes, it was geeky. The DockerCon has been characterised for having a lot of high technical content which is in fact what you expect when you go to an event like this. Lots of workshop with lots of information, oriented to people with previous experience, highly focused on Linux given that it was where it was first created. 

There was a lot of talk about security and as important announcements Docker Desktop Enterprise (incredible), the open sourced of the compose controller for kubernetes and docker-assemble,  that will analyze the framework, versions, dependencies, and caches and automatically give you a Docker image. 

Coming here has made me understand that there’s no stopping containerization. I saw a talk from Lindsay Corporation’s Agricultural IoT Solution about their journey to containerize tightly coupled Windows and Linux applications and accelerate cloud migration of its legacy applications to enable faster time to market. They showed numbers on reducing energy consumption, carbon emissions and water usage by 17%. The expected global impact is impressive. The cost savings for many companies running large on-premise systems have the potential to be huge.

I enjoyed the talk from a woman in tech Silvia Puglisi who is a former researcher from my university the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. She works in the Tor project and she explained how Docker Containers can be used to spawn onion services, securely and anonymously, from your computer which in my opinion is really cool.

As a Docker novice, I am really excited to see where this goes in the company I work for. I must say that we have done impressive work in recent years moving our already of age monolith into microservices with Docker to put our applications in containers for deployment. But we can get better, we are not currently using Docker in production, we do not use orchestration, and our docker images are not pushed to a registry or versioned.  And we are going to get better, we already have set Docker as something crucial in our objectives. As a developer, this is a great opportunity to learn a lot and after the DockerCon I am sure that we are heading in the right direction.

I really enjoyed those 3 days, the lineup, the venue, the delicious food, the gadgets, the party…

Thanks to the speakers, organizers and all the attendees I had the chance to meet - it was great to see and talk to all of you! Catch you next year!

Find out more about the author - Sara Rodriguez Cubillas