9 ms·

Microsoft and Docker team up to make packaging cloud-native applications easier

276 points by kaboro 8y ago

zapita 8y ago
I’m an avid user of both docker compose and kubernetes/helm, and have been very frustrated by the lack of interoperability between them. This looks like it might get us there, which makes me very happy. Nice work Microsoft and Docker.
- gabrtv 8y ago
  Thanks! We're excited about the opportunity to align Compose and Helm with a standard packaging/distribution/management model. Same is true for other tooling like Terraform, Ansible, and cloud provider declarative APIs (Azure Resource Manager, etc).
gabrtv 8y ago
Gabe from Microsoft here. Happy to answer any questions. A few links to help you explore the spec and tooling: - https://cnab.io https://cnab.io - https://duffle.sh/ https://duffle.sh/ - https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-agnostic-format-packaging-running-distributed-applications/ https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-...
- politician 8y ago
  Are there plans to work with CNCF on this spec to gain a broader consensus? EDIT: As a cloud systems architect, I view participation in CNCF as a positive signal.
  - gabrtv 8y ago
    Yes. The intention has always been to put CNAB and related tooling into a foundation that offers vendor-neutral IP ownership. That could be CNCF, OCI, or something else.
- donmcronald 8y ago
  I wonder if I'm misunderstanding. Why would I want install, uninstall, etc. type actions running in a Docker container? Isn't that going to encourage people to spin up production environments that aren't reproducible? I'm not very familiar with Ansible, etc., so maybe tools like that have strategies for building deterministic environments, but I can see a lot of people putting `apt-get` or `yum` commands in an install script.
  - mnoorali 8y ago
    The goal with CNAB is to be able to version your application with all of its components and then ship that as one logical unit making it reproducible. The package format is flexible enough to let you use the tooling that you're already using.
  - gabrtv 8y ago
    CNAB makes reproducibility possible by providing unified lifecycle management, packaging, and distribution. Of course if bundle authors don't take care to work around problems with imperative logic, that's a risk. In practice, we see declarative models for building bundles offer more reproducibility. For example, see how you can build a CNAB using a Terraform base image: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/terraform https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/terraform
    - donmcronald 8y ago
      Yeah. I read through some of those existing configs and I see how it works now. My first instinct when I see `cnab/app/run install` is to think it's for installing the app, but now I see it's for provisioning / deploying to the environment. As soon as I think of install, uninstall as deploy, undeploy then it clicks for me.
      - bacongobbler 8y ago
        We may want to discuss changing the keywords from install/uninstall to be deploy/uninstall if that helps signal to the user the intent behind those actions. That's great feedback, thank you!
- politician 8y ago
  Do CNAB bundles support the ability to specify where parameter and credential details might be fetched from? Currently, we provide developers with lab environments that wire together a small subset of containers under Docker compose for local development because running the full system is impractical. However, most of our lab environments may have important external dependencies (i.e. Slack, SMTP gateways, etc) that require configuration and often secrets. One challenge of maintaining these lab environments is keeping these external configuration details up to date, so it would be helpful if the CNAB spec allowed configuration of this sort to be provided by an external provider similar to how Docker images themselves are expected to be provided by a container registry. Have you anticipated this use case? If so, does CNAB have this type of support?
  - gabrtv 8y ago
    Yes. See credential sets in the specification. https://github.com/deislabs/cnab-spec/blob/master/802-credential-sets.md https://github.com/deislabs/cnab-spec/blob/master/802-creden...
    - politician 8y ago
      Thanks Gabe, this looks promising.
- throwaway981298 8y ago
  When are you going to buy Docker Inc?
- ravedave5 8y ago
  I am one of those people who learn through examples. Do you have an example of using duffle for defining some sort of application? I work with this stuff and the websites are so abstract as to what it does and the spec is so low level...
  - mnoorali 8y ago
    Absolutely! You can find some example bundles here: https://aka.ms/example-bundles https://aka.ms/example-bundles
    - mnoorali 8y ago
      Here is also a video of us running through some examples to give you a high level walkthrough of CNAB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26e5-UK4YRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26e5-UK4YRA
      - outside1234 8y ago
        I'm even more confused after watching this video. Is the right way to think about this that it is a common specification that enables helm and compose to interoperate?
      - chanezon 8y ago
        You can find some preview binaries of docker-app with CNAB support as well as a few simple examples at https://github.com/docker/app#cnab-support-preview https://github.com/docker/app#cnab-support-preview
- polskibus 8y ago
  Does it work with Windows Server and Windows 10 the same way that docker does? Can it be utilized without docker?
- mcny 8y ago
  Thank you for being here and answering questions. Is there any way you can (internally) push to remove roadblocks for the insanity of Windows Home vs Pro for Docker/Hyper-V? I know this isn't possible in the short run but I think it prevents a lot of children from getting started with Docker. Based on what Scott Guttrie's team has been able to accomplish, I am cautiously optimistic that this is possible if there is enough push for it from within Microsoft. Thank you once again for your support!
  - beavis2 8y ago
    If you want to play the "think of the children" card, then let's start by discouraging development on Windows.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - scarface74 8y ago
      I would discourage development for Windows but not necessarily on Windows. I develop on Windows and deploy to Linux all of the time. I also have started using the Linux subsystem for Windows. I’ve been developing for and on Windows for over 20 years. The “Windows Tax” didn’t become a concern of mine until I started using cloud providers. The cost of Microsoft’s licenses was someone else’s problem. But, when every resource you use is tagged and it’s very clear how much you’re spending on an implementation, the double hit of Windows becomes real. First you pay more for Windows VMs than the same size Linux VMs and then you need more resources. I can do a lot with a 256Mb-512Mb RAM Linux VM. I at least need 4GB of RAM for Windows and that’s stretching it. On the other hand, I still love .Net Core but it’s not getting the uptake that Node is or even Java - yes that makes me sad.
      - nikanj 8y ago
        Why do you need 8x more memory for Windows? The NT kernel isn’t 8x worse than Linux, not even close.
- sytse 8y ago
  The announcement talks about "reliably provision application resources in different environments". Does that mean multiple clouds? I'm asking because in the Ansible example in https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/blob/master/ansiblebase/bundle.json https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/blob/master/ansiblebase/... I see AZURE_TENANT AZURE_CLIENT_ID AZURE_SECRET AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID but nothing for other clouds. Would you have to add configuration for every cloud you have to support?
  - mnoorali 8y ago
    The format is cloud agnostic. Here is an example of a bundle that Bitnami built that provisions wordpress and Amazon RDS https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpress-k8s-rds https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpres...
    - sytse 8y ago
      Thanks! In https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/blob/master/wordpress-k8s-rds/bundle.cnab https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/blob/master/wordpres... I see AWS but not Azure. It seems that in this context cloud agnostic means any cloud can be supported. I'm interested in application portability [0]. To do this with CNAB you need to add every cloud to the bundle. This is contrast to something like Crossplane [1] that intents to support multi-cloud with a single specification. 0. https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity-model-2de185c01dd7 https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity-mode... 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600603#18601961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600603#18601961
      - bdburns 8y ago
        You can build a kubernetes based bundle that is cloud agnostic.
    - amouat 8y ago
      I'm a little confused by this. I get the specification is cloud agnostic. But it looks like the developer needs to write the underlying code to provision and maintain the application on the various clouds. It feels like a too thin abstraction. And it seems pretty leaky currently; the examples all have hard and specific requirements e.g. Azure, k8s etc. What am I missing? Is the idea that we will create tooling to automatically create the provisioning and maintenance code?
- ilaksh 8y ago
  How is this not just an alternative to normal Docker tools? Does it run on Linux?
  - bGl2YW5j 8y ago
    > How is this not just an alternative to normal Docker tools? From my understanding, you've got Docker for defining your app's services, you've got Kubernetes for orchestrating them, you've got Terraform et al. for defining/configuring your infrastructure, and now you've got CNAB/Duffle to bring all these tools and configs together under one umbrella. > Does it run on Linux? From the article[1] posted above: > By design, it is cloud agnostic. It works with everything from Azure to on-prem OpenStack, from Kubernetes to Swarm, and from Ansible to Terraform. It can execute on a workstation, a public cloud, an air-gapped network, or a constrained IoT environment. [1] https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-agnostic-format-packaging-running-distributed-applications/ https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-...
- patrickaljord 8y ago
  Is it possible to run duffle bundles on my kubernetes cluster right now? Couldn't find any docs. Thanks!
  - mnoorali 8y ago
    Yea absolutely. Check out the hellohelm bundle for a simple example: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm and the Bitnami Wordpress + Amazon RDS bundle for one with multiple components: https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpress-k8s-rds https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpres...
    - patrickaljord 8y ago
      What would be the advantage over just using helm directly? (not a criticism, I'm not a big helm user for now, just kubectl but would like to know the difference for future project). Do you plan to integrate CNAB into kubernetes directly so we can bypass helm in the future?
      - gabrtv 8y ago
        If you're only using Kubernetes, straight Helm might be a better fit. But imagine you need to run your Helm chart on Kubernetes environment that doesn't have access to your container images. You could build a thick bundle from your Helm chart, put it on USB stick, sneaker-net it over to a disconnected Kubernetes cluster, hydrate a container registry and run the Helm chart with full fidelity in the new environment. This is just one thing CNAB enables..
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
skboosh 8y ago
I've been working on something similar with sugarkube[1]. It looks like it takes a different approach and aims to solve more of the toolchain. I'd be interested in feedback if anyone has the time... [1]https://github.com/sugarkube/sugarkube https://github.com/sugarkube/sugarkube
- nprateem 8y ago
  Can you elaborate? It's not completely clear from the README.
  - skboosh 8y ago
    Imagine you're running Wordpress on K8s. It actually needs ingress, Cert Manager for SSL certs and a DB. Locally you might want to use MariaDB for convenience, but in the cloud you want to use RDS. Sugarkube lets you install everything in a single pass. In this example you'd create several different bundles (MS call them CNABs, I call them kapps to disambiguate them from apps which is an overloaded term). You'd create one for nginx ingress, one for cert manager, and one for wordpress. But the wordpress one is parameterised differently per environment to either create a MariaDB when running locally or RDS when running in the cloud. These bundles are just stored in a git repo. Under the hood, Sugarkube calls Make with some predefined targets - right now just install, but in future also destroy - and passes a bunch of environment variables that the kapp declares that it needs. These can be loaded from a hierarchical YAML configuration which Sugarkube reads (kind of like hiera/puppet does). Oh, and it can template files as well. 'Make' just calls whatever you've implemented - Helm, terraform, any non-k8s stuff you need (there's no dependency on K8s in the architecture). You can easily drop down and ignore Sugarkube and just work directly with tools you already know. Sugarkube also lets you control which versions of which bundles to release to your environments. It can support multiple live environments. A final thing is it can also spin up clusters on a variety of backends - minikube, kops, and in future EKS/AKS/GKE, etc. So altogether Sugarkube gives you a complete solution for launching clusters (ephemeral if you like), and installing your dependencies into them (all as a single golang binary). Check out the example project (https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project) which launches a minikube cluster, installs nginx-ingress, cert manager and 2 wordpress instances backed by MariaDB, and then loads different sample data into both databases. It's still in preview but it can solve a real pain point around working with K8s and deploying applications.
013a 8y ago
Does this directly compete with Helm?
- gabrtv 8y ago
  No, in fact we view CNAB as enabling broader adoption of Helm. Some of the first bundles we built use Helm and Kubernetes. See: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm
crsv 8y ago
How do these solutions compare to something like https://containership.io https://containership.io?
- bacongobbler 8y ago
  I'm a bit confused by your question. Would you mind expanding a bit on that thought?
tjfontaine 8y ago
Both crossplane[1] and CNAB are attempting to play in similar spaces, understanding that deploying an application for the cloud (public or private) is more than just dumping your software into an image and giving it to a provider (be it K8s or some other IaaS/PaaS stack). There's more associated with the application, specifically what it means to orchestrate IaaS/PaaS/SaaS to realize your application. But I see CNAB falling into the same trap as Helm, and many of the package managers before them (including newer variants with things like charm/juju), an archive with some notion of lifecycle events is not enough. Even though it's cute that lifecycle events are encapsulated in containers making it easier to manage their runtime dependencies. What I think makes Crossplane's model more attractive is the notion of building on top of Kubernetes design and leveraging things like the operator pattern[2]. Now application stacks can do more interesting actions during their lifecycle, which can work to preserve availability during an event (like upgrading your application stack). Crossplane is about expanding the management of resources beyond just containers running in your cluster, but to any resource you can model in the K8s control plane and writing software that can react to events related to those resources. [1] https://blog.upbound.io/introducing-crossplane-open-source-multicloud-control-plane/ https://blog.upbound.io/introducing-crossplane-open-source-m... [2] https://coreos.com/operators/ https://coreos.com/operators/
- gabrtv 8y ago
  We are big fans of Kubernetes operators. However, taking a dependency on Kubernetes to solve this problem is not something our customers want. CNAB design acknowledges this, and leans on the concept of invocation images to perform lifecycle management. Take the example of deploying serverless functions and a cloud based datastore (like CosmosDB) with a 3rd-party DNS service. Kubernetes operators are a poor fit for this, as they presume the existence of a Kubernetes cluster.
  - philips 8y ago
    I see it a bit differently. To me it looks like CNAB invents a new way of describing and deploying an application that looks nothing like a Kubernetes API while Crossplane is trying to use the existing Kubernetes API tooling to interoperate with and leverage that ecosystem. Just because you are using a Kubernetes API doesn't mean you are presuming a Kubernetes cluster IMHO. The work being done with virtual kubelet[1] illustrates that. So, I guess I am confused. You have users that want to package their app in containers, and run those containers. However, those users don't want to use Kubernetes APIs to do it? Why? [1] https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet
busser 8y ago
I was at DockerCon EU today when Matt Butcher announced this. I wondered how CNAB would relate to existing cloud native package managers like Helm, especially since a big part of Helm comes from Matt himself. He told me that he and his team saw the need for something like CNAB after finishing their work on Helm 2, but that they would keep working on Helm 3. He also explained that Helm could be used to install some or all components of an application bundled in CNAB format, which makes sense.
the_common_man 8y ago
Is this targeted at IT or devops or developers? Also, how does this compare to https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io ?
AlexB138 8y ago
This strikes me as possibly being somewhat similar to Habitat from Chef but, like Habitat at launch, I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what this does.
- codereflection 8y ago
  I had the same thought. Seems very similar to Habitat, but I'm still fairly confused as to where CNAB fits and what it's solving.
yarrel 8y ago
It's 2023. You develop on Windows, store your code on GitHub, and deploy to Azure with Docker. You are able to develop and deploy your code only because Microsoft allow you to. But it's OK, Microsoft love "Open Source".
webwanderings 8y ago
First thought: Helm. Second, unappealing brand name. Is it Helm?
- bacongobbler 8y ago
  No, it is unrelated to Helm, though the engineers working on the spec (including myself) are Helm core maintainers.
john_moscow 8y ago
I smell like acquisition.
amirhirsch 8y ago
NOTE: THIS HEADLINE DOES NOT MEAN THAT DOCKER WORKS IN WINDOWS I have spent all day today trying to switch from running Docker in a Vagrant to running Docker for windows and can say without question that Docker and Windows are incompatible as of today. Specific issues are numerous, but primarily it is slow, and has stupid defaults, volumes will drive you nuts, don't use with cygwin or Ubuntu for Windows either (volumes won't work) and expect everything to crash your terminals.
- anime_forever 8y ago
  I use docker every day with windows without serious issues, what problem exactly are you seeing?
- ttty 8y ago
  I'm using docker right now on my win 10 64bit pro
  - amirhirsch 8y ago
    Yea me too finally. Switched from running in vagrant today and it shouldn't have felt like an achievement. It should work in cygwin and ubuntu for windows sanely, but it doesn't and it's pretty slow and temperamental so I'm not sure how many re-installs or restarts will be required tomorrow. We had issues with our redis dataset being too large for the default memory allocation settings. Here's a relevant ticket if it's running slowly for you you might get some pointers: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1936 https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1936
- sbhn 8y ago
  The trick is to install the legacy docker toolbox with kitematic and docker-compose. The desktop shortcuts dont wirk, so you will need to also fix those. You will also need ensure you are using the oracle vm virtual box. Its all a real pain to get to work, but it seems to be ok, for simple projects.
holografix 8y ago
Is this Microsoft’s Docker compose but with packaged Docker images that get deployed to Azure? Ie: K8s for humans?
CyanLite4 8y ago
How long before Microsoft buys Docker?

276 points by kaboro 8y ago

I’m an avid user of both docker compose and kubernetes/helm, and have been very frustrated by the lack of interoperability between them. This looks like it might get us there, which makes me very happy. Nice work Microsoft and Docker.

gabrtv 8y ago
Thanks! We're excited about the opportunity to align Compose and Helm with a standard packaging/distribution/management model. Same is true for other tooling like Terraform, Ansible, and cloud provider declarative APIs (Azure Resource Manager, etc).

gabrtv 8y ago

Gabe from Microsoft here. Happy to answer any questions. A few links to help you explore the spec and tooling: - https://cnab.io https://cnab.io - https://duffle.sh/ https://duffle.sh/ - https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-agnostic-format-packaging-running-distributed-applications/ https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-...

politician 8y ago
Are there plans to work with CNCF on this spec to gain a broader consensus? EDIT: As a cloud systems architect, I view participation in CNCF as a positive signal.
- gabrtv 8y ago
  Yes. The intention has always been to put CNAB and related tooling into a foundation that offers vendor-neutral IP ownership. That could be CNCF, OCI, or something else.
donmcronald 8y ago
I wonder if I'm misunderstanding. Why would I want install, uninstall, etc. type actions running in a Docker container? Isn't that going to encourage people to spin up production environments that aren't reproducible? I'm not very familiar with Ansible, etc., so maybe tools like that have strategies for building deterministic environments, but I can see a lot of people putting `apt-get` or `yum` commands in an install script.
- mnoorali 8y ago
  The goal with CNAB is to be able to version your application with all of its components and then ship that as one logical unit making it reproducible. The package format is flexible enough to let you use the tooling that you're already using.
- gabrtv 8y ago
  CNAB makes reproducibility possible by providing unified lifecycle management, packaging, and distribution. Of course if bundle authors don't take care to work around problems with imperative logic, that's a risk. In practice, we see declarative models for building bundles offer more reproducibility. For example, see how you can build a CNAB using a Terraform base image: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/terraform https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/terraform
  - donmcronald 8y ago
    Yeah. I read through some of those existing configs and I see how it works now. My first instinct when I see `cnab/app/run install` is to think it's for installing the app, but now I see it's for provisioning / deploying to the environment. As soon as I think of install, uninstall as deploy, undeploy then it clicks for me.
    - bacongobbler 8y ago
      We may want to discuss changing the keywords from install/uninstall to be deploy/uninstall if that helps signal to the user the intent behind those actions. That's great feedback, thank you!
politician 8y ago
Do CNAB bundles support the ability to specify where parameter and credential details might be fetched from? Currently, we provide developers with lab environments that wire together a small subset of containers under Docker compose for local development because running the full system is impractical. However, most of our lab environments may have important external dependencies (i.e. Slack, SMTP gateways, etc) that require configuration and often secrets. One challenge of maintaining these lab environments is keeping these external configuration details up to date, so it would be helpful if the CNAB spec allowed configuration of this sort to be provided by an external provider similar to how Docker images themselves are expected to be provided by a container registry. Have you anticipated this use case? If so, does CNAB have this type of support?
- gabrtv 8y ago
  Yes. See credential sets in the specification. https://github.com/deislabs/cnab-spec/blob/master/802-credential-sets.md https://github.com/deislabs/cnab-spec/blob/master/802-creden...
  - politician 8y ago
    Thanks Gabe, this looks promising.
throwaway981298 8y ago
When are you going to buy Docker Inc?
ravedave5 8y ago
I am one of those people who learn through examples. Do you have an example of using duffle for defining some sort of application? I work with this stuff and the websites are so abstract as to what it does and the spec is so low level...
- mnoorali 8y ago
  Absolutely! You can find some example bundles here: https://aka.ms/example-bundles https://aka.ms/example-bundles
  - mnoorali 8y ago
    Here is also a video of us running through some examples to give you a high level walkthrough of CNAB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26e5-UK4YRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26e5-UK4YRA
    - outside1234 8y ago
      I'm even more confused after watching this video. Is the right way to think about this that it is a common specification that enables helm and compose to interoperate?
    - chanezon 8y ago
      You can find some preview binaries of docker-app with CNAB support as well as a few simple examples at https://github.com/docker/app#cnab-support-preview https://github.com/docker/app#cnab-support-preview
polskibus 8y ago
Does it work with Windows Server and Windows 10 the same way that docker does? Can it be utilized without docker?
mcny 8y ago
Thank you for being here and answering questions. Is there any way you can (internally) push to remove roadblocks for the insanity of Windows Home vs Pro for Docker/Hyper-V? I know this isn't possible in the short run but I think it prevents a lot of children from getting started with Docker. Based on what Scott Guttrie's team has been able to accomplish, I am cautiously optimistic that this is possible if there is enough push for it from within Microsoft. Thank you once again for your support!
- beavis2 8y ago
  If you want to play the "think of the children" card, then let's start by discouraging development on Windows.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I would discourage development for Windows but not necessarily on Windows. I develop on Windows and deploy to Linux all of the time. I also have started using the Linux subsystem for Windows. I’ve been developing for and on Windows for over 20 years. The “Windows Tax” didn’t become a concern of mine until I started using cloud providers. The cost of Microsoft’s licenses was someone else’s problem. But, when every resource you use is tagged and it’s very clear how much you’re spending on an implementation, the double hit of Windows becomes real. First you pay more for Windows VMs than the same size Linux VMs and then you need more resources. I can do a lot with a 256Mb-512Mb RAM Linux VM. I at least need 4GB of RAM for Windows and that’s stretching it. On the other hand, I still love .Net Core but it’s not getting the uptake that Node is or even Java - yes that makes me sad.
    - nikanj 8y ago
      Why do you need 8x more memory for Windows? The NT kernel isn’t 8x worse than Linux, not even close.
sytse 8y ago
The announcement talks about "reliably provision application resources in different environments". Does that mean multiple clouds? I'm asking because in the Ansible example in https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/blob/master/ansiblebase/bundle.json https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/blob/master/ansiblebase/... I see AZURE_TENANT AZURE_CLIENT_ID AZURE_SECRET AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_ID but nothing for other clouds. Would you have to add configuration for every cloud you have to support?
- mnoorali 8y ago
  The format is cloud agnostic. Here is an example of a bundle that Bitnami built that provisions wordpress and Amazon RDS https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpress-k8s-rds https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpres...
  - sytse 8y ago
    Thanks! In https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/blob/master/wordpress-k8s-rds/bundle.cnab https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/blob/master/wordpres... I see AWS but not Azure. It seems that in this context cloud agnostic means any cloud can be supported. I'm interested in application portability [0]. To do this with CNAB you need to add every cloud to the bundle. This is contrast to something like Crossplane [1] that intents to support multi-cloud with a single specification. 0. https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity-model-2de185c01dd7 https://medium.com/gitlab-magazine/multi-cloud-maturity-mode... 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600603#18601961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18600603#18601961
    - bdburns 8y ago
      You can build a kubernetes based bundle that is cloud agnostic.
  - amouat 8y ago
    I'm a little confused by this. I get the specification is cloud agnostic. But it looks like the developer needs to write the underlying code to provision and maintain the application on the various clouds. It feels like a too thin abstraction. And it seems pretty leaky currently; the examples all have hard and specific requirements e.g. Azure, k8s etc. What am I missing? Is the idea that we will create tooling to automatically create the provisioning and maintenance code?
ilaksh 8y ago
How is this not just an alternative to normal Docker tools? Does it run on Linux?
- bGl2YW5j 8y ago
  > How is this not just an alternative to normal Docker tools? From my understanding, you've got Docker for defining your app's services, you've got Kubernetes for orchestrating them, you've got Terraform et al. for defining/configuring your infrastructure, and now you've got CNAB/Duffle to bring all these tools and configs together under one umbrella. > Does it run on Linux? From the article[1] posted above: > By design, it is cloud agnostic. It works with everything from Azure to on-prem OpenStack, from Kubernetes to Swarm, and from Ansible to Terraform. It can execute on a workstation, a public cloud, an air-gapped network, or a constrained IoT environment. [1] https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-agnostic-format-packaging-running-distributed-applications/ https://open.microsoft.com/2018/12/04/announcing-cnab-cloud-...
patrickaljord 8y ago
Is it possible to run duffle bundles on my kubernetes cluster right now? Couldn't find any docs. Thanks!
- mnoorali 8y ago
  Yea absolutely. Check out the hellohelm bundle for a simple example: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm and the Bitnami Wordpress + Amazon RDS bundle for one with multiple components: https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpress-k8s-rds https://github.com/bitnami/cnab-bundles/tree/master/wordpres...
  - patrickaljord 8y ago
    What would be the advantage over just using helm directly? (not a criticism, I'm not a big helm user for now, just kubectl but would like to know the difference for future project). Do you plan to integrate CNAB into kubernetes directly so we can bypass helm in the future?
    - gabrtv 8y ago
      If you're only using Kubernetes, straight Helm might be a better fit. But imagine you need to run your Helm chart on Kubernetes environment that doesn't have access to your container images. You could build a thick bundle from your Helm chart, put it on USB stick, sneaker-net it over to a disconnected Kubernetes cluster, hydrate a container registry and run the Helm chart with full fidelity in the new environment. This is just one thing CNAB enables..

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

skboosh 8y ago

I've been working on something similar with sugarkube[1]. It looks like it takes a different approach and aims to solve more of the toolchain. I'd be interested in feedback if anyone has the time... [1]https://github.com/sugarkube/sugarkube https://github.com/sugarkube/sugarkube

nprateem 8y ago
Can you elaborate? It's not completely clear from the README.
- skboosh 8y ago
  Imagine you're running Wordpress on K8s. It actually needs ingress, Cert Manager for SSL certs and a DB. Locally you might want to use MariaDB for convenience, but in the cloud you want to use RDS. Sugarkube lets you install everything in a single pass. In this example you'd create several different bundles (MS call them CNABs, I call them kapps to disambiguate them from apps which is an overloaded term). You'd create one for nginx ingress, one for cert manager, and one for wordpress. But the wordpress one is parameterised differently per environment to either create a MariaDB when running locally or RDS when running in the cloud. These bundles are just stored in a git repo. Under the hood, Sugarkube calls Make with some predefined targets - right now just install, but in future also destroy - and passes a bunch of environment variables that the kapp declares that it needs. These can be loaded from a hierarchical YAML configuration which Sugarkube reads (kind of like hiera/puppet does). Oh, and it can template files as well. 'Make' just calls whatever you've implemented - Helm, terraform, any non-k8s stuff you need (there's no dependency on K8s in the architecture). You can easily drop down and ignore Sugarkube and just work directly with tools you already know. Sugarkube also lets you control which versions of which bundles to release to your environments. It can support multiple live environments. A final thing is it can also spin up clusters on a variety of backends - minikube, kops, and in future EKS/AKS/GKE, etc. So altogether Sugarkube gives you a complete solution for launching clusters (ephemeral if you like), and installing your dependencies into them (all as a single golang binary). Check out the example project (https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project https://github.com/sugarkube/sample-project) which launches a minikube cluster, installs nginx-ingress, cert manager and 2 wordpress instances backed by MariaDB, and then loads different sample data into both databases. It's still in preview but it can solve a real pain point around working with K8s and deploying applications.

013a 8y ago

Does this directly compete with Helm?

gabrtv 8y ago
No, in fact we view CNAB as enabling broader adoption of Helm. Some of the first bundles we built use Helm and Kubernetes. See: https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm https://github.com/deislabs/bundles/tree/master/hellohelm

crsv 8y ago

How do these solutions compare to something like https://containership.io https://containership.io?

bacongobbler 8y ago
I'm a bit confused by your question. Would you mind expanding a bit on that thought?

tjfontaine 8y ago

Both crossplane[1] and CNAB are attempting to play in similar spaces, understanding that deploying an application for the cloud (public or private) is more than just dumping your software into an image and giving it to a provider (be it K8s or some other IaaS/PaaS stack). There's more associated with the application, specifically what it means to orchestrate IaaS/PaaS/SaaS to realize your application. But I see CNAB falling into the same trap as Helm, and many of the package managers before them (including newer variants with things like charm/juju), an archive with some notion of lifecycle events is not enough. Even though it's cute that lifecycle events are encapsulated in containers making it easier to manage their runtime dependencies. What I think makes Crossplane's model more attractive is the notion of building on top of Kubernetes design and leveraging things like the operator pattern[2]. Now application stacks can do more interesting actions during their lifecycle, which can work to preserve availability during an event (like upgrading your application stack). Crossplane is about expanding the management of resources beyond just containers running in your cluster, but to any resource you can model in the K8s control plane and writing software that can react to events related to those resources. [1] https://blog.upbound.io/introducing-crossplane-open-source-multicloud-control-plane/ https://blog.upbound.io/introducing-crossplane-open-source-m... [2] https://coreos.com/operators/ https://coreos.com/operators/

gabrtv 8y ago
We are big fans of Kubernetes operators. However, taking a dependency on Kubernetes to solve this problem is not something our customers want. CNAB design acknowledges this, and leans on the concept of invocation images to perform lifecycle management. Take the example of deploying serverless functions and a cloud based datastore (like CosmosDB) with a 3rd-party DNS service. Kubernetes operators are a poor fit for this, as they presume the existence of a Kubernetes cluster.
- philips 8y ago
  I see it a bit differently. To me it looks like CNAB invents a new way of describing and deploying an application that looks nothing like a Kubernetes API while Crossplane is trying to use the existing Kubernetes API tooling to interoperate with and leverage that ecosystem. Just because you are using a Kubernetes API doesn't mean you are presuming a Kubernetes cluster IMHO. The work being done with virtual kubelet[1] illustrates that. So, I guess I am confused. You have users that want to package their app in containers, and run those containers. However, those users don't want to use Kubernetes APIs to do it? Why? [1] https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet https://github.com/virtual-kubelet/virtual-kubelet

busser 8y ago

I was at DockerCon EU today when Matt Butcher announced this. I wondered how CNAB would relate to existing cloud native package managers like Helm, especially since a big part of Helm comes from Matt himself. He told me that he and his team saw the need for something like CNAB after finishing their work on Helm 2, but that they would keep working on Helm 3. He also explained that Helm could be used to install some or all components of an application bundled in CNAB format, which makes sense.

the_common_man 8y ago

Is this targeted at IT or devops or developers? Also, how does this compare to https://cloudron.io https://cloudron.io ?

AlexB138 8y ago

This strikes me as possibly being somewhat similar to Habitat from Chef but, like Habitat at launch, I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what this does.

codereflection 8y ago
I had the same thought. Seems very similar to Habitat, but I'm still fairly confused as to where CNAB fits and what it's solving.

yarrel 8y ago

It's 2023. You develop on Windows, store your code on GitHub, and deploy to Azure with Docker. You are able to develop and deploy your code only because Microsoft allow you to. But it's OK, Microsoft love "Open Source".

webwanderings 8y ago

First thought: Helm. Second, unappealing brand name. Is it Helm?

bacongobbler 8y ago
No, it is unrelated to Helm, though the engineers working on the spec (including myself) are Helm core maintainers.

john_moscow 8y ago

I smell like acquisition.

amirhirsch 8y ago

NOTE: THIS HEADLINE DOES NOT MEAN THAT DOCKER WORKS IN WINDOWS I have spent all day today trying to switch from running Docker in a Vagrant to running Docker for windows and can say without question that Docker and Windows are incompatible as of today. Specific issues are numerous, but primarily it is slow, and has stupid defaults, volumes will drive you nuts, don't use with cygwin or Ubuntu for Windows either (volumes won't work) and expect everything to crash your terminals.

anime_forever 8y ago
I use docker every day with windows without serious issues, what problem exactly are you seeing?
ttty 8y ago
I'm using docker right now on my win 10 64bit pro
- amirhirsch 8y ago
  Yea me too finally. Switched from running in vagrant today and it shouldn't have felt like an achievement. It should work in cygwin and ubuntu for windows sanely, but it doesn't and it's pretty slow and temperamental so I'm not sure how many re-installs or restarts will be required tomorrow. We had issues with our redis dataset being too large for the default memory allocation settings. Here's a relevant ticket if it's running slowly for you you might get some pointers: https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1936 https://github.com/docker/for-win/issues/1936
sbhn 8y ago
The trick is to install the legacy docker toolbox with kitematic and docker-compose. The desktop shortcuts dont wirk, so you will need to also fix those. You will also need ensure you are using the oracle vm virtual box. Its all a real pain to get to work, but it seems to be ok, for simple projects.

holografix 8y ago

Is this Microsoft’s Docker compose but with packaged Docker images that get deployed to Azure? Ie: K8s for humans?

CyanLite4 8y ago

How long before Microsoft buys Docker?