Home > Cloud, DevOps, VMware, VMworld > VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Cloud Native Apps Lab – HOL-SDC-1630

VMworld EU 2015 Buzz: Cloud Native Apps Lab – HOL-SDC-1630

October 27th, 2015

Adding some more colour to the highlights from my VMworld Europe 2015 coverage:

“DevOps, Containers, Docker, Mesos, Kubernetes, Microservices, 12-factor applications, 3rd platform, oh my!” is how it is described.

The VMware Hands-on-Labs are available online from http://labs.hol.vmware.com/ and the VMworld specific ones are available from: http://labs.hol.vmware.com/vmworld. It doesn’t seem the VMworld labs are available yet post show and this lab isn’t available with the main ones so hopefully this will appear soon.

This was a big ‘ol lab with plenty of content. Labs are in 90 minute slots which you can extend by 20 minutes and topics may not be finished in time so you may need another session to complete.

All the seats were full when I arrived but I was able to use my own laptop and just connect over the internet to do the lab, I could have done it from anywhere in the world. Kudos to the lab team, they’ve done a great job, the layout was great, no delays or any connectivity issues.

2015-10-12 10.39.22 2015-10-12 10.53.51

This lab went through a fair amount of background information on what microservices are (splitting apart monolithic applications into many more nimble parts) and listed the 12 factors that ideally make up a cloud native applications. You can read more about them at http://12factor.net/ and in plain English http://www.clearlytech.com/2014/01/04/12-factor-apps-plain-english/

The lab then went through an explanation of containers, Docker (company that does containers) and Kubernetes (container orchestrations)


Then onto what VMware brings to the table, they have:

  • Photon OS (linux distro made for containers)
  • Lightwave (access management, think of it as an Open Source Active Directory, vSphere 6.0 Platform Services Controller shares some code)
  • AppCatalyst (pre-build container runtime for developer laptops)
  • Photon Controller (open source control place including Lightwave)

Then the tech playing started, 1st a video to show you how to bring up a container host in 90 seconds.

First up was working with Photon OS and having a look around the repositories, then onto Lightwave and creating two domain controllers, pairing them together and creating, logging onto as and deleted users.

Then onto Docker, run a container, make a change to it, checked it into a repository, pulled and ran the new image, really showing how quickly you can spin up and down and change containers.

The next section was on Kubernetes which is a cluster manager, you have many containers, they need to be orchestrated and Kubernetes is your friend. Unfortunately something went wrong with my installation of everything so I couldn’t see the actual containers working. The lab went through the steps to create a scale-out guestbook container application which had its data in a reddis database.

This meant I could’t get the networking part to work also and configure flannel.

As the lab is over the internet, I wouldn’t mind coming back to work it out sometime.

Then the lab highlighted using vRealize Operations to view Docker Docker Dashboards
and be able to see Docker objects and also then see logs in vRealize Log Insight.

The lab finished with showing Kubernetes with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) which is a future new hypervisor built just for containers.

For my effort I even bagged a T-shirt:

2015-10-12 12.53.58 2015-10-12 12.54.02

An interesting lab for what I could get working and very far out of my comfort zone so something I would like to spend the time to know. I know containers, microservices is the future but where I work in Enterprise IT, this is still far away but you need to start somewhere and I need to start learning!

Comments are closed.