Today  I spoke at Docker Bangalore Meetup which took place in IBM India Systems Development Lab(ISL) – an R&D Division located at Manyata Embassy Business Park. Docker Bangalore Meetup Group is one of the most highest registered (holds around 5000+ registered Docker users currently) in India. Founded in November 22, 2013, it is now 4 year old and has been led by a Docker Captain & Founder of CloudYuga, Neependra Khare who has been actively organising this event since its birth. This event was Live streamed using Google HangOut and most of the sessions are available under YouTube here.

This time I chose  “An Introduction to LinuxKit” topic as I spent considerable amount of time writing
blogs around LinuxKit, InfraKit, Moby and it’s supported platforms. Since DockerCon 2017, I have written around 6-7 blogs primarily on LinuxKit on various platform and this was one great chance to meet with Docker enthusiasts and clarify around Docker  Vs Moby Vs LinuxKit.

Neependra started the Meetup talking about Moby. He clarified most of the facts around “Docker ! = Moby” and talked around Moby tool. He touched upon LinuxKit YAML file and demonstrated docker-17.06-ce container service built by Moby tool & LinuxKit toolkit. It was overall very interactive session and there were couple of great questions from the audience related to Moby assemblies. Docker Captain, Sreenivas Makam from Cisco delivered a great deep-dive talk around “Docker networking – Common issues and troubleshooting techniques”.  He brought up interesting troubleshooting techniques and common issues around Docker Networking and you can find his impressive slide here.

I was the 2nd speaker on the row. I started my talk with “Why LinuxKit?” and spent considerable amount of time talking about the problem statement which led to the birth of LinuxKit. I walked through the audience on LinuxKit & introduced new Moby playground called as “Play with Moby“. In case you’re new, Play-with-moby (PWM) is a site made by Docker captains Marcos Nils and Jonathan Leibiusky as an extension of PWD. PWM is a Moby playground which allows you to try different components of the platform in seconds. It gives you the experience of having a free Alpine Linux Virtual Machine in the cloud where you can build and run Moby projects and even create clusters to experiment. Under the hood DIND or Docker-in-Docker is used to give the effect of multiple VMs/PCs.

At the end of the session, I demonstrated around “Building Docker containers using LinuxKit”. I enjoyed talking around LinuxKit Packaging System” during which there were numerous interesting queries from the audience. You can refer the below slides to get the glimpse of the talk.

Few of interesting questions around Moby & LinuxKit:

1. How does LinuxKit implementation works for bare metal system?
2. Can I build CentOS based LinuxKit Operating System as we use CentOS primarily on IBM Power System S822LC?
3. What’s happening around LinuxKit Security areas? How secure is LinuxKit today?
4. Can I use my own customised Kernel and get it work under LinuxKit YAML?
5. Is LinuxKit completely open source?
6. What is the story of Volume mount in terms of LinuxKit? What about the data persistence?

Special thanks goes to all the speakers for the valuable sessions. I have been closely watching the feedback and I could read that the audience liked the event and enjoyed the informative session. Thanks to IBM ISL Team for your sponsorship and a great lunch at the end of the day.

If you are keen to learn what’s happening in LinuxKit, Moby & Docker space, don’t miss out the below links –

• Why Infrakit & LinuxKit are better together for Building Immutable Infrastructure?
• Running LinuxKit on AWS Platform made easy
• A Quick Look at LinuxKit Packaging System
• LinuxKit 101: Getting Started with LinuxKit for Google Cloud Platform
• When Moby Meet Kubernetes for the first time
• Test-Drive LinuxKit OS on Oracle VirtualBox running on macOS Sierra