DockerCon 2016 – Day 1, Workshop and registration
In my previous post I talked about my first day in Seattle and about the sight seeing I did ahead of the DockerCon 2016 conference. Today I am reporting about the first day of conference related activities.
Still used to the US Central timezone I woke up early in the morning. I was greeted by a wonderful day. The sun was shining yet it was pretty chilly. In the morning we had no Docker related activities planned thus I could enjoy myself and do some more private stuff. Once again Yelp was my assistant in finding a good breakfast place. The suggestion was Biscuit Bitches on 2nd street. The place is really small and a lot of people were already waiting for their food when I arrived after 10:30 am or so. Never the less I ordered my food – I selected the Sloppy Spicy Seattle Bitch and a 20 oz cafe mocha. After an hour or so I finally got my order, just right before I was dying of starvation. The biscuit was really tasty and sloppy and the coffee was making me happy.
Soon it was 1:30 pm when the registration for the Sunday workshop started. The registration was quick and painless and soon I sat in one of the big meeting rooms of the Sheraton hotel. It turned out that the workshop was not really a workshop but more of a presentation. It was a very interesting talk and the presenter Chris Richardson did a very good job. The topic of the “workshop” was micro services.
Rich talked about the two fundamental architecture, monolith and micro services and specified for each its pros and cons. I felt very at home because that is exactly what we (Andrew Siemer, Miguel Gonzales, James Allen and me) also do in our Micro Services Panel Discussion that we present at various user group meetings in and around Houston, Austin and San Antonio. According to Chris micro services come with a price but they really shine in big and complicated projects. I can only confirm this conclusion.
Interestingly Chris also introduced Event Sourcing as a possible way to solve the problem of synchronizing data between micro services. One of the principles of a good micro services architecture is that each service has its own private data that no other service can touch. Thus “the database” as integration point does not exist anymore. How do now 2 micro services that need some “shared” data work together? Events to the rescue! It seems that the popularity of the micro services architecture has brought us back event sourcing. I have written many blog posts about this topic (e.g. here) and I find it very interesting how this comeback is happening.
Right after the workshop we all headed over to the Washington State Congress Center to register for the conference. The registration was a bit chaotic. I guess Docker was just overwhelmed by the large number of participants. As one guy noted “They should have spun up more instances to scale…”. Of course in real life with real people the scaling is not so easy. But finally I got my batch and a backpack as gift and was ready to enjoy the welcome party.
All sponsors had their boots ready when the party started. I had some good talks with the Docker guys about Docker Data Center and Docker for Mac and Windows. Some good stuff is in the pipeline. I’m happy to hear that first hand. It is great to see how vibrant the ecosystem around containers is. All major players like Redhat, IBM, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Cisco, Rackspace, etc. and many smaller and new companies like CodeShip, Splunk, NewRelic, RancherLabs, etc. were presenting their innovative products. I had a lot of interesting conversations about the pros and benefits of their respective product offerings with many of these companies. It’s always good to talk to some representative in person and even get a quick demonstration.
Apart from that I collected lots of t-shirts from the various vendors and enjoyed some drinks and nice appetizers.
Now I am looking forward to a first day full of container related presentations. Keep tuned.