Official Docker Images – Lessons Learned

A presentation at XP Days in in Kyiv, Ukraine, 02000 by Philipp Krenn

If you want to be taken seriously, you need to provide containers to your users. It’s easy — everybody is uploading containers to Docker Hub, right? Unfortunately, reality is never as easy as it sounds at first. This talk gives an overview of Elastic’s ongoing journey to providing official Docker images:

  • Docker Hub: What “official” really means and why we are using our own registry.
  • Base image: Just use Alpine — it is small and the perfect fit for containers. We tried that and reconsidered…
  • Release policy: What do you actually get in a specific tag and how are we releasing our images?
  • Support: Combine two complex systems like Elasticsearch and Docker — and you will get a lot of questions.
  • Orchestration: Our current approach for orchestration and how we are treating feature requests.

Video