With Docker 1.10 approaching soon, I wanted to talk about one of the useful new features coming that makes it easier to run containers in read-only mode. Using the new --tmpfs you can run a container as read only, but still use writeable directories for things like /etc, /tmp or /run but discard changes when a container is stopped.

By default, Fedora Atomic images come with cloud-init, which supports customization of various aspects of the running instance, including password for the default user. However, if many users in an organization should have access to the Atomic Host, the local configuration of the instance will not scale and user identities, authentication, and authorization need to be based on external identity management solution.

For IPA (FreeIPA/IdM), Active Directory, or generic LDAP servers, SSSD can serve as an agent providing these services, from user identity lookups and user group membership resolution to access control. With an SSSD container now available, Fedora Atomic Hosts can be deployed in very similar way to normal Fedora.

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.

The CentOS Atomic SIG has released an updated filesystem tree and new set of deployment/installation images, featuring updates to docker and atomic, among other components.

Check out the details below, and stay tuned for the next CentOS Atomic Host update, which should arrive soon after the main CentOS Project finishes building its next major release.

Earlier this week we released version 0.2.2 of Atomic App. The first update since our major refactor in 0.2.1.

The release of 0.2.1 introduced a major refactor of our code base as well as numerous new features to Atomic App. Such as:

The Docker Brno Meetup group had its second big meeting on 15 October 2015 at 6 pm at the Impact Hub in Brno, Czech Republic. This meeting followed up a monthly set of more informal gatherings in pubs around the city and the first meeting on 18 May 2015.

At LinuxCon Europe 2015 from 5-7 October, 2015 in Dublin, Ireland. Project Atomic’s Joe Brockmeier moderated a panel discussion between Tom Barlow from Docker, Sebastien Goasguen of Citrix, and Brandon Philips from CoreOS about containers.

As you may know, the technology underlying containers is not new and that a big part of the innovation provided by Docker and others is essentially an easier way to package and access this technology. However, there are key questions ahead as the technology continues to mature and transcend the “it’s just packaging” idea. I didn’t transcribe the entire session, but I wanted to call out a few of the exchanges and how they affect various roles.

In a interesting coincidence, the same day we posted the super privileged containers post using Sysdig, the Sysdig team announced support for Atomic hosts. You can take a look at that announcement for how sysdig does it’s magic on an Atomic host and which Atomic hosts are supported.

So no more need to build your own sysdig container for your Atomic clusters, you can use the official builds. Here’s what that looks like now.

The Docker Brno Meetup group will have its next meeting on 15 October 2015 at 6 pm at the Impact Hub in Brno, Czech Republic. Four talks are planned for the meeting to address a wide range of docker users and people interested in learning more. The community element will be enhanced by visitors from the Docker Bratislava, Docker Prague and Docker Krakow Meetup groups.

The CentOS Atomic Host train rolls on, with an updated filesystem tree and new set of deployment/installation images: > Today we’re announcing an update to CentOS Atomic Host (version 7.20151001), a lean operating system designed to run Docker containers, built from standard CentOS 7 RPMs, and tracking the component versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host. > > CentOS Atomic Host is available as a VirtualBox or libvirt-formatted Vagrant box, or as an installable ISO, qcow2 or Amazon Machine image. These images are available for download at cloud.centos.org. The backing ostree repo is published to mirror.centos.org. > > CentOS Atomic Host includes these core component versions: > > * kernel-3.10.0-229.14.1.el7.x86_64 > * cloud-init-0.7.5-10.el7.centos.1.x86_64 > * atomic-1.0-115.el7.x86_64 > * kubernetes-1.0.3-0.1.gitb9a88a7.el7.x86_64 > * flannel-0.2.0-10.el7.x86_64 > * docker-1.7.1-115.el7.x86_64 > * etcd-2.1.1-2.el7.x86_64 > * ostree-2015.6-4.atomic.el7.x86_64

For more information about the release, check out the announcement post over at the CentOS Project blog.