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Category: Containers

Why You Should Learn about Containers

Published 2021-09-21 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey has an editorial:

I find myself doing more and more work with containers. Yet, I also find that a lot of people seem to be resistant to the concept. I’m always surprised when technologists reject technology without fully understanding what it does. Let’s talk about this just a little.

I completely agree with Grant’s assessment and want to pile on a bit about cloud services and containers. If you’re using or thinking of using services like Azure Machine Learning or Azure IoT Hub, that work is all containerized. And there’s a lot which runs in containers that we don’t even think about. You don’t need to live your life in containers or run everything from containers, but they’re useful in several contexts.

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Patched Security Flaw in Azure Container Instances

Published 2021-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Ionut Ilascu reports on a vulnerability:

Microsoft has fixed a vulnerability in Azure Container Instances called Azurescape that allowed a malicious container to take over containers belonging to other customers on the platform.

An adversary exploiting Azurescape could execute commands in the other users’ containers and gain access to all their data deployed to the platform, the researchers say.

This is fixed now, but it’s a good reminder that platform-as-a-service offerings can still have security problems (as we’ve also seen recently with Power Apps and Cosmos DB).

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Updating SQL Server Container Memory Limits

Published 2021-08-09 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski doesn’t have time to restart containers:

When running multiple SQL Server containers on a Docker host we should always be setting CPU and Memory limits for each container (see the flags for memory and cpus here). This helps prevent the whole noisy neighbour situation, where one container takes all the host’s resources and staves the other containers.

But what if we forget to set those limits? Well, no worries…we can update them on the fly!

Click through to see how you can change the memory limits on a running container.

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Deploying Custom Docker Images in Azure ML

Published 2021-08-05 by Kevin Feasel

Tsuyoshi Matsuzaki shows us how to deploy an Azure ML model via custom Docker image:

In my early post, I have showed you how to bring your own custom docker image in training with Azure Machine Learning.
On the contrary, here I’ll show you how to bring custom docker image in model deployment.

In Azure Machine Learning, the base docker image in deployment includes the inferencing assets, such as, Flask server, etc. So you should use AML compliant image for base image, even when you use your own custom docker image.
The list of these maintained AML images is available in https://github.com/Azure/AzureML-Containers .

Read on for an example.

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Installing Kubernetes on Docker Desktop

Published 2021-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Joy George Kunjikkur takes another stab at Kubernetes:

This is 3rd or 4th time, I am learning Kubernetes (hereafter mostly refer as K8s short form) hands-on sessions. Every time I learn the kubectl command and its options, I forget as there were no chances to apply in the day job. Another mistake I did all those times was missing to post learning to this blog.

Hope this time I will get a chance to use it in the day job and not miss posting the Kubernetes learning on to this blog.

This post is very basic. The aim is to get started with the Kubernetes development environment using Docker Desktop. Below are the steps at a high level to get started. Detailed steps with videos are available on the internet.

Read on for some installation tips, including how to install the Kubernetes dashboard for a UI experience.

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Issue with SQL Server and High Availability in Kubernetes

Published 2021-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski has a problem:

I’ve been running a proof of concept for SQL Server on Kubernetes over the last year or so (ok, probably longer than that…hey, I’m a busy guy 🙂 ) and have come across an issue that has been sort of a show stopper.

There are currently no HA solutions for SQL Server running on plain K8s (not discussing Azure Arc here) so my tests have been relying on the in-built HA that Kubernetes provides but there’s a problem.

Be sure to check it out because it is a doozy.

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Deploying Azure Policies via Terraform

Published 2021-07-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan D’Aloia shows how you can use Terraform to work with Azure Policies:

As you may all know Terraform serves a great purpose in deploying resources and infrastructure into your Azure environment, however, Terraform can also be used to automate and consistently deploy Azure Policies which can be defined prior to any resources being generated. In this blog, I will cover how you can import policies into your Terraform State to then deploy into an Azure Resource Group in order to secure your landing zone prior to deploying any resources.

Click through for an example.

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Setting Resource Constraints on Containers

Published 2021-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino won’t let this container run amok:

Docker gives you the ability to control a container’s access to CPU, Memory, and network and disk IO using resource constraints, sometimes called Limits. You define limits as parameters when creating containers. In its default configuration, a container will have no resource constraints for accessing resources of the host operating system. This post will look at how to configure resource constraints in Docker and look at how SQL Server sees the resources when CPU and Memory resource constraints are in place.

In this post, we will focus on using CPU and Memory Limits using the parameters --cpus <value> and --memory <value>. These provide the essential resource controls for access to CPU and Memory available on the host. If you want to dive deep into the various types of resource constraints available in Docker, check out this page https://docs.docker.com/config/containers/resource_constraints/. The goal of this post is to introduce the SQL Server DBA into resource constraints in containers.

Read on to learn how you can use CPU and memory limits to control resource allocation for SQL Server containers—including at runtime.

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