As most folks know, Red Hat has already been working hard on Docker support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today we’re taking the wraps off a new operating system concept for running Docker containers called Project Atomic. This concept, known as an Atomic Host, will provide users with a familiar host environment for Docker containers that allows atomic updates to the host OS as well as containerized...

The response to the Project Atomic launch has been overwhelming, and we’re getting a lot of interest – and questions – about the project. In particular, many developers and admins want to know what sets Atomic apart from other Docker-focused offerings. 

A Distribution You Know and Trust

One of the most compelling reasons for users of Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that the Atomic...

Ever wondered if you can get systemd running in a Docker container? Apparently Dan Walsh did, and spent some time getting it to work.

While working with Docker, I looked at the great work that Scott Collier was doing for getting services to run within a container. Scott provides the fedora-dockerfiles package in docker with lots of “Dockerfile” examples. You can build Docker images by running...

As I’ve mentioned a number of times when I’ve spoken about Software Collections (SCLs), containers and SCLs are not mutually exclusive. In fact, SCLs promise to be really important for a lot of developers in building containers for production.

Langdon White has written up a great post on how to move an RHSCL app to Docker using an Atomic host:

Ok, now that Atomic is installed, I need to go make...

Yesterday at DockerCon, the Docker folks announced the 1.0 release along with a number of other interesting announcements. To make sure that the Atomic community has the latest and greatest tools to work with, we’ve rolled up a new image based on Fedora 20 with Docker 1.0 and a number of other updates.

Note that some of the packages in this image come from updates-testing or Copr builds. A big...

Today we proposed a CentOS Atomic Host Special Interest Group (SIG) on the CentOS Devel mailing list. Since Project Atomic isn’t in the business of producing its own distribution, the idea is to work within the CentOS community to develop an Atomic Host based on CentOS.

If you’re interested in participating, the discussion about the SIG will take place on the CentOS devel mailing list. Work on the project will be coordinated on the Atomic devel mailing list.

The next step for the proposal is to have it reviewed by the CentOS Board. The next board meeting is on July 9th, so we hope to have the SIG accepted at that time and make headway towards getting the first CentOS Atomic Host release out the door.

The full proposal is below. If you have comments, please raise them on the CentOS devel or Atomic devel mailing lists.

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Yesterday, Karanbir Singh announced an alpha-quality build of CentOS 7 Atomic that’s suitable for developing rpm-ostree tools and helping the SIG get started.

As KB points out, the images contain unsigned content that’s produced outside the CentOS.org build system. You should be able to run Docker containers just fine, but it doesn’t yet include Cockpit or Kubernetes packages.

Also, there’s not...

Running applications in Docker is easy. Developers and users are finding this out in droves, which is why Docker is a runaway success. But is it safe? The answer seems to be a resounding it depends, but trending more closely to yes as work continues on Docker and we learn more about how to secure workloads.

Jérôme Petazzoni, tinkerer extraordinaire at Docker, gave an excellent presentation at LinuxCon...

A great follow-up to my post about Jérôme Petazzoni’s post on Docker and security, Dan Walsh has a post up on OpenSource.com explaining just what’s being done about Docker security.

Says Dan, “Docker, Red Hat, and the open source community are working together to make Docker more secure. When I look at security containers, I am looking to protect the host from the processes within the container...

Mark Lamourine is working on an excellent series of posts that demonstrate how you’d use Kubernetes to run services using Docker containers. The latest is Kubernetes: Simple Containers and Services.

The most recent post explores creating the subsidiary services for a Pulp service within a Kubernetes cluster:

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The Fedora Project holds regular Test Days to help put releases or individual components through their paces. This week, Fedora’s Test Day will focus on Cockpit, which will be part of the Fedora Atomic Host in Fedora 21.

If you’d like to participate, be sure to look over the Test Day on the Fedora wiki and check out the prerequisites, test cases, and how to file results and bugs.

Note that the...

The CentOS project has updated its Docker Images on the Docker Hub for CentOS 5, CentOS 6, and CentOS 7.

If you’re using CentOS containers, you can quickly update the image with docker pull centos:centos6 (to get CentOS 6.6). This will grab the image if you don’t have it locally, or update the image if you have it and just need to catch up to the latest release.

The latest releases are: * CentOS...

The CentOS Atomic SIG is pleased to announce that we have a CentOS Atomic Host image ready for testing. The image is currently being built in CentOS infrastructure, but not yet fully integrated into CentOS build systems.

The image should be considered alpha quality, ready for testing, patches, and feedback. It’s more or less package-complete but we still have a ways to go before calling the CentOS Atomic Host ready for any production workloads:

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As Fedora ramps up for the final Fedora 21 release, scheduled for December 9th, we want to make sure that all the components and variants of Fedora get a proper testing. To that end, the Fedora Cloud Working Group is holding a Fedora Test Day on Thursday, 20 November.

Please join us in the #atomic channel on Freenode if you have questions, or shoot us an email to cloud@lists.fedoraproject.org

If you’re running the CentOS images released last month, you’ll notice that you can pull an update using atomic update that will pick up updates to a number of crucial packages (e.g. Docker) from base CentOS as well as additional packages carried by the Atomic SIG.

We also have new monthly images up on CentOS.org, and a new pointer to the most recent images.

Any time you want to grab the most...

Good news, everybody! Fedora 21 was officially released yesterday with not just one, not just two, but three flavors &hdash; a Cloud, Server, and Workstation release. You should definitely check out the workstation and server releases, but I want to focus particularly on the Cloud release with its Atomic Host image.

If you head over to the Get Fedora Cloud Page, you’ll find the download page with...

If you’re running the CentOS Atomic Host images, you’ll want to do an atomic upgrade right about now. The update includes a bump for Docker to 1.4, and brings Cockpit to 0.27, and pulls in a few additional package updates.

As you’ve probably read, Docker 1.4 includes a few bug fixes, security fixes, and several new features.

Cockpit 0.27 is the most recent stable release from the Cockpit Project...

With just a few days into 2015, it may not seem like it – but Red Hat Summit and DevNation are just around the corner. The call for proposals is due to close on 7 January, and we’d like to encourage folks who are doing interesting things with Atomic and containers to submit proposals before the CfP closes.

We really want to hear from you, so if you’re working with Atomic and have something interesting...

Interested in Project Atomic? Looking to help make Fedora and CentOS Atomic Hosts even better? Join us for a half-day workshop at DevConf.cz in Brno on Saturday, 7 February 2015.

After lunch, we’ll meet to work on the Atomic Host Definition, plans for Fedora and CentOS Atomic Host, and projects that are essential to Project Atomic.

Full venue information can be found on the DevConf.cz site. We...

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Linux Enterprise Atomic Host earlier today. This pulls together work from Project Atomic and makes it ready for organizations that are looking to package and run applications based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and 7 as containers.

This release includes all the components (Docker, Kubernetes, Flannel, systemd, etc.) that you need to...

A couple of interesting Atomic releases to take a look at this week. The Fedora Project has released Fedora 22 alpha, which includes the Cloud edition Atomic Host images, as well as the Server and Workstation editions. We also have a few new test images from the CentOS Atomic SIG to check out – including Vagrant boxes.

Fedora Images

The Fedora release includes the standard raw and qcow2 images...

Summer is approaching, and it’s time for camp! Container.Camp, that is.

Okay, that’s a bit of a hokey lead-in. The good news is that I’ll try to avoid that sort of thing during my talk at Container.Camp this Friday.

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In case you missed it, Fedora 22 Beta was released today with images for using Fedora Atomic Host. If you’re looking for qcow2 images for KVM, Vagrant Boxes, or EC2 AMIs, you’ll find them all there. But wait, there’s more!

Not listed on the product page, but worth checking out, is an ISO you can use to install Atomic on bare metal (or in another virtualization platform of your choice). You can find that image here, along with its CHECKSUM file.

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Earlier this week, VMware launched its lightweight operating system tailored for running Linux containers. Naturally, I was interested to see what VMware was cooking up, since that’s the same target we have for Project Atomic.

First, it’s great to see more interest in solving the problem of running Linux containers at scale. Even better, VMware seems to be interested in doing its work in the open. It’s always great to see companies that traditionally lean towards proprietary software taking steps towards doing more open source work. More open source work, even when it’s similar to other projects, is almost always a Good Thing™.

That said, I’d like to encourage VMware to consider whether they need to start from scratch with Project Photon. Creating an operating system from scratch is not trivial in the least, and there’s a lot of work that could be shared between Photon and Atomic.

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Last week I had the opportunity to attend Container.Camp in San Francisco and present an introduction to Project Atomic. If you didn’t get to attend – or just want to relive the talk – you can find it on YouTube (also embedded below).

If you’d like to see all of the Container.Camp presentations, they’re available on YouTube under the Container.Camp channel. Thanks again to the Container.Camp organizers for inviting me to speak, it was a great event. Fantastic speakers, really interesting venue, and a great crowd.

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A quick note for folks who might have missed the announcement yesterday, Fedora 22 was officially released, along with Atomic images for OpenStack/KVM, Amazon EC2, and Vagrant.

The Vagrant images are suitable for VirtualBox and libvirt/KVM, so they’re usable on Linux (libvirt), or Mac OS X and Windows (VirtualBox) with the appropriate Vagrant providers. Josef Stříbný has written up a short tutorial...

In case you missed the news on Twitter, we’re taking this show on the road! Specifically, we have a few opportunities to learn more about Project Atomic in Tokyo, Japan.

Next week, I’ll be attending LinuxCon Japan to speak about Project Atomic and the traditional package problems.

We’ll also be hosting a Meetup in Ebisu on 2 June at the Red Hat Tokyo office! If you’re local to Tokyo (or can...

Heading to the SouthEast LinuxFest this weekend? If so, be sure to stop by the Red Hat booth to pick up some Project Atomic shirts and stickers!

If you’re looking about talks relevant to Atomic, you can catch my talk on Saturday All You Wanted to Know About Linux Containers at 2:45, or Containers and the Future of Open Source Software Delivery on Sunday at 11:30.

Michael Solberg will be speaking...

Still wondering what this Atomic stuff is all about? Want a quick primer on Project Atomic?

Join us on Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern for a high level introduction to Project Atomic and its components. We’ll look at all the pieces of Atomic, from Atomic Host, to rpm-ostree, the Atomic command (/usr/bin/atomic), Nulecule, and Atomic App.

The event is hosted on BlueJeans, you can view the event using...

We would like to announce the general availability of CentOS Atomic Host (May 2015), a lean operating system designed to run Docker containers, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host (7.1.2), and built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs.

CentOS Atomic Host is produced by the CentOS Atomic SIG, based on upstream work from Project Atomic.

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Attending ContainerCon in Seattle this year? Co-located with CloudOpen and LinuxCon, ContainerCon is focused on bringing contributors working with containers, the Linux kernel, and other components together to continue improving the Linux container ecosystem.

As you might expect, there’s quite a few talks on the schedule related to Project Atomic or components important to Atomic (like Kubernetes). Here’s a sample of talks you might want to plan on seeing:

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The Fedora Project’s Cloud Working Groupis happy to announce the first post-Fedora 23 Atomic release. Fedora Atomic Host is optimized to run Docker containers and is on a rapid-release cycle to match the pace of Linux container technology.

Approximately every two weeks we will release the Fedora Atomic Host image in all of our supported formats (installable ISO, qcow2, Vagrant Boxes, and EC2 images), with the most up-to-date snapshot of our stack to work with Linux containers.

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The Fedora Project’s Cloud Working Group is pleased to announce the December 15 two-week Fedora Atomic Host is ready to download. Fedora Atomic Host is optimized to run Docker containers and is on a rapid-release cycle to match the pace of Linux container technology. Note that there will be no release on December 29 due to the holiday.

We release the Fedora Atomic Host builds approximately every two weeks in all the supported formats (installable ISO, qcow2, Vagrant Boxes, and EC2 images), with the most up-to-date snapshot of our stack to work with Linux containers.

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Want to help make Fedora Atomic Host even better? Join us tomorrow for the Fedora Cloud Test Day, where we’ll be banging on the Atomic Host image for Fedora. As always, we’re looking for many hands to help put the image through its paces.

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