May 2017 – Shekhar Gulati

Talk: Container Performance Analysis

Today, I watched DockerCon 2017 talk on Container Performance Analysis. Talk is given by Brendan Gregg, Senior Performance Architect at Netflix. In his talk, he shares various linux tools that can help you understand performance of your container platform. It is a great talk for anyone trying to do performance analysis of containers. In one of his slides, he shared 10 tools that he will use to start the investigation.

uptime to check load averages
dmesg | tail to check kernel errors
vmstat 1 to see overall stats by time
mpstat -P ALL 1 to check CPU balance
pidstat 1 to check process usage
iostat -xz 1 to disk I/O
free -m to check memory usage
sar -n DEV 1 to check network I/O
sar -n TCP, ETCP 1 to view TCP stats
top for overview

Continue reading “Talk: Container Performance Analysis”

Talk: Alpaca Static Typing On The Beam

Today, I watched talk Alpaca Static Type Checking on the Beam. alpaca-lang is a statically typed functional programming language inspired by ML family of languages for the Erlang VM. It has strong type inference based on Hindley-Milner type system. Type checker will disallow adding String to an Integer. It looks like an interesting language. Continue reading “Talk: Alpaca Static Typing On The Beam”

Multi-stage Docker Image Build for Java Applications

A few days back, I discovered a new Docker feature — multi-stage builds. The multi-stage build feature helps you create thin Docker images by giving possibility to divide image building process into multiple stages. Artifacts produced in one stage can be resused by another stage. This is very beneficial for languages like Java as multiple steps are required to build the Docker image. The main advantage of multi-stage build feature is that it can help you create smaller size images. This feature is not yet available in stable versions of Docker. It will become available in Docker 17.05. To use this feature, you have to use edge version of Docker CE.

To build a Docker image for a Java application, you first need to build the Java project. Java build process needs JDK and a build tool like Maven, Gradle, or Ant. Once Java binary artifact is produded, you can package the binary in a Docker image. For running a Java binary, you only need JRE so you don’t have to pay the cost of bundling the whole JDK.

You can read full blog at https://blog.xebialabs.com/2017/05/25/multi-stage-docker-image-build-for-java-applications/

5 Docker Utilities You Should Know

There are a lot of cool Docker utilities that you can find on the web. Most of these are open source and available on Github. I have become an active user of Docker for last two years, using it for most of my development projects. As you start using Docker, you will find Docker is suitable for more use cases than you initially envisioned it for. You will want Docker to do a little more for you, and it will not disappoint you.

Docker community is very active, a lot of useful utilities keep popping daily. It is difficult to keep check of all the innovation happening in the community. In the following post, I have collected some interesting and useful Docker utilities which I use in my daily work. These utilities makes me more productive, otherwise would have been a manual work.

In this post, I will cover watchtower, docker-gc, docker-slim, rocker, and ctop utilities. You can read full blog at https://blog.xebialabs.com/2017/05/18/5-docker-utilities-you-should-know/.