Docker Turns To Minecraft For Server Ops (sdtimes.com) 93
dmleonard618 writes: A new GitHub project is allowing software teams to construct software like Legos. DockerCraft is a Minecraft mod that lets administrators handle and deploy servers within Minecraft. What makes this project really interesting is that it lets you navigate through server stacks in a 3D space. "In today's world, we wanted to focus more on building. Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of the decade, so we chose to use that as our visual interface to Docker," Docker wrote in a blog.
Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of the d (Score:-1, Troll)
Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of the decade
... for 10 year olds.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 42. I agree with his statement about it being the sandbox game of the decade. Feel free to provide your alternative when you are done with your ad hominem.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:0)
What's it like having the brain of a 10 year old?
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:4, Funny)
You'll just have to wait a few years and find out for yourself.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:0)
OH SNAP!
Re: Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of t (Score:0)
Being awesome
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:5, Funny)
What's it like having the brain of a 10 year old?
Its great, I keep it in a jar on the shelf.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:0)
Skyrim and Fallout standout as more prominent sandbox games. Other games include Stranded Deep, Miscreated, Life is Fedual, H1Z1, DayZ, RUST ..
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:3, Insightful)
You clearly don't know what prominent means. Your grab bag of DayZ inspired clones are so incredibly niche and platform-limited that most gamers have never even heard of them. Most *gamers* are familiar with Bethesda games but outside that group it's not well recognised. EVERYONE knows what Minecraft is.
Now if you had said Grand Theft Auto you might have an argument. Pretty much everyone alive knows about that one too. But in terms of prominence Minecraft still takes it due to it's penetration in serious disciplines like academia and science.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:3)
GTA makes a great model for systems management!
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:-1)
And you clearly don't know what a sandbox game is. I think you were looking for Open World perhaps. And you're a fucking moron.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:0)
Why should there be an "alternative" for a game if you're forty two fucking years old? Ever heard of women, scotch, other people, volunteering, the outside? That's a fucking sandbox.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:1)
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:2)
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:-1)
then stop fucking seagulls.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:5, Funny)
Nah - forget Minecraft as a sysadmin tool... let's bring back PSDOOM [sourceforge.net]!
(just don't kill the init monster! [sourceforge.net] )
Warning (Score:0)
Just beware of having your avatar starve while playing.
Also, keep the lights on or you might lose data to creepers.
Re:Warning (Score:0)
on an ordinary minecraft server you can simply turn off mob griefing so a creeper exploding will only hurt players and not destroy any blocks. now if you had sheep to represent containers it would be a different problem :P
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:2)
I was going to bring up psdoom as well. I'd like to see a mod for GTA 4/5 that works in a similar manner. NPCs as random processes and such ;)
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:2)
Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of the decade
... for 10 year olds.
Minecraft is too popular for the "cool" kids.
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:2)
I've found that children enjoy the base game but don't have the attention span to do really mind-expanding things with it. I'm 49, play modded Minecraft a lot, and find the technical and artistic challenges very enticing and involved. It's like any other inspired-crafting hobby - a box of legos, a palette of paints, a bag of ICs, a block of wood - you get out of it as much as you put into it. While a 10 year old can build a small lego kit, there are groups of adults who reproduce whole movie scenes with them. A child's fingerpainting and Bob Ross's paintings come from the same basic colors. And where would technology be if someone didn't put all those electronic parts together in new and interesting ways?
If you look at an open-ended opportunity and only see a limited outcome, is the problem with the opportunity, or the person who doesn't see it?
Re:Minecraft has emerged as the sandbox game of th (Score:2)
Next you'll be saying that there's a difference between code produced by a 10-year old and one trained in advanced Information Technology.
That's a slippery slope that leads to thinking that you can't just hire people to do enterprise-grade IT work for milk and cookies.
Minecraft is for LUDDITES. (Score:-1)
Modern app appers know that only apps can app apps, and Minecraft is a LUDDITE game written in LUDDITE Java. Only apps apped in AppScript or AppApp are appy enough to be appy apps!
Apps!
Re:Minecraft is for LUDDITES. (Score:0)
recipe for server cabinet (Score:1)
So how many trees does one need to chop down to craft a server cabinet?
Re: recipe for server cabinet (Score:0)
Who cares about them servers, lets go mine for cryptocurrency!
And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:-1)
How do you update it? And not just it, the 10 000 other containers you also deployed. And not just heartblead, how do you continuously patch these things as updates are made available? I'm an old Solaris admin that used zones long before you Linux guys even heard the word container, and I'm not getting Docker. Sure, it's a nice way to get a MySQL server up and running on a developer's laptop but running it in production? Yikes!
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:0)
No worries, systemd will be implementing Minecraft (as unreadable binary blobs of course) early next year.
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:1)
You update the Docker container with the latest updates ("apt-get update && apt-get upgrade") and push the updated docker container ("docker push apache-server") to your own private Docker repository. You can do one of many things on the 1000 production machines. You could write a script to monitor the Docker repo for changes and on a change pull the image (docker pull apache-server:latest") and then restart the container(s) ("docker stop web-server && docker rm web-server && docker run apache-server -t web-server").
You really aren't curious about how to manage containers in production but are just interested in spreading FUD about something you clearly know nothing about.
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:0)
My intention is not to spread FUD. I'm genuinely interested and what you wrote in your answer is definitely something to look into. My understanding is that this is however not the way most Docker users uses Docker, but I don't have any statistics. However, according to some people that do [coreos.com] it doesn't look very good.
For example, CVE-2014-0160, aka "Heartbleed" has been known for over 18 months, yet Quay Scanning found it is still a potential threat to 80 percent of the Docker images users have stored on Quay. Just like CoreOS Linux contains an auto-update tool which patched Heartbleed at the OS layer, we hope this tool will improve the security of the container layer, and help make CoreOS the most secure place to run containers.
Now I don't know exactly what Quay is. But if 80 percent of images are still vulnerable to something that was fixed over 72 hours ago then that sounds like a lot of people are seriously not paying attention.
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:0)
There is nothing particularly concerning about images on a public repository that require updates. No admin is just going to deploy any kind of system (be it baremetal, VM or container) without checking if updates are required. Install any Linux distribution from scratch and you'll have to do the same thing. Every way of packaging software known to man has this limitation.
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:0)
I agree, most people are idiots and can't be bothered to learn to do something the right way. All too often I see people on /. saying that it's impossible to keep Docker containers up to date. Keeping containers secure and up to date is pretty easy. I doubt people running insecure Docker containers would do a better job keeping their VM/hardware OS patched.
Re:And when the next Heartblead happens (Score:0)
Keep in mind that these numbers may be extremely skewed/outright dishonest. The apache-server example above could have 40 different images stored on their servers. Each image being an iteration of changes, apache-server:v1.00 - apache-server:v1.39 very well may all be insecure while apache-server:v1.40 is patched and is the Docker image running in production. It's technically true that 39 of the images may be insecure but if they're not being ran then it doesn't matter. Quay has no idea which containers people are running they're just hosting private Docker repos.
Uh oh (Score:5, Funny)
This is all well and good until a rogue creeper blows up half of your servers.
Re:Uh oh (Score:2)
This is all well and good until a rogue creeper blows up half of your servers.
Or someone just logs in and places TNT everywhere just for fun after all you are in creative mode!
Re:Uh oh (Score:2)
Meh. Business as usual then.
Re:Uh oh (Score:0)
It's a server-side mod which implies it's a private server.
If you're private server isn't private...
I'll let you sort out who the fool is.
Re:Uh oh (Score:0)
Chaos Monkey anyone?
It's a UNIX system... (Score:4, Funny)
I know this!
Re:It's a UNIX system... (Score:2)
I know this!
Classic.
They bred raptors? (Score:2)
They bred raptors?
I've see this before... (Score:-1)
IT'S A UNIX SYSTEM!
Burning server stacks (Score:2)
Re:Burning server stacks (Score:3)
I was really hoping to see a representation of a representation of this ... instead it's a link to an article where a guy says there's a thing and then links to two other things.
I remember when we used to have links to actual articles.
Aesthetics over function, FTW (Score:3)
Re:Aesthetics over function, FTW (Score:0)
This is pretty close to how cyberpunk novels/movies describe server administration. You could actually have someone hack into your minecraft server and float around manipulating servers & containers while fighting with swords & arrows.
Re:Aesthetics over function, FTW (Score:2)
Hack the Gibson! :P
minecraft is java (Score:0)
what about java multicore intelligence .
Re:minecraft is java (Score:0)
The server they are using isn't based on java. It's written in c++.
PopularMMOs is now job training. (Score:3)
So now instead of my girls watching hours of PopularMMOs, they will watch hours of people managing servers? The ability of the human mind to come up with ever more inane forms of entertainment always surprises me. Plus, you know, girls and STEM careers and all that.
Someone should come up with a Minecraft Motif skin. If you are going to go blocky and retro, at least do it right.
Minecraft at work (Score:1)
Re:Minecraft at work (Score:2)
Is there any reason that this kind of setup couldn't be used to create virtual servers and network environments?
I've always wondered how long it would be until there was a CAD-like drawing environment for creating virtual server environments.
The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:1)
The Plural of Lego is not Legos, It's Lego Bricks.
I cannot find the official link on their web page but the following link points points to a number of discussions and official Lego announcements and requests.
http://english.stackexchange.c... [stackexchange.com]
Now the following is juts my personal reaction to the use of LEGOs.
The Plural of Lego is Lego. In the same way that the plural of a Sheep is Sheep. You don't hear somebody say "I'm going to round up my Sheeps" you hear them saying "I'm going to round up my sheep" (Actually, you probably hear them say "I'm going to round up the flock" But that doesn't help my argument)
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:1)
That should, of course, have read "The following is JUST my personal" not "juts me personal"
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:2)
For a lot of people, this fact would have been significant.
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:0)
http://www.lego.com/en-gb/legal/legal-notice/fair-play
Proper Use of the LEGO Trademark on a Web Site
If the LEGO trademark is used at all, it should always be used as an adjective, not as a noun. For example, say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGO BRICKS". Never say "MODELS BUILT OF LEGOs".
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:2)
Yeah this is a pet peeve of mine too. I think it's just an American thing though. I grew up in Australia and it was always just lego. As in, "go and pick up all your lego". Etc. I never heard the 'legos' thing until I moved to the USA in my late 20s ... at first I thought I was hearing things but no, they really say it that way.
I'm curious - anyone from outside North America that also says "legos"?
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:2)
how about in danish?
in finnish the lego word itself gets altered to be plural, to be 'from' or whatever..
Re:The plural of LEGO is LEGO Bricks Not LEGOs (Score:2)
The Plural of Lego is not Legos, It's Lego Bricks.
"Lego" doesn't have a plural.
The singular of "Lego bricks" is "Lego brick."
Oh brother -- more idiotic 3D UI (Score:2)
3D UI's don't work (well) because they are horribly inefficient.
There is a reason we have shortcuts, aliases, scripts, batch files, etc. A command line, or hell, even a 2D grid of icons, is far faster time-wise then 3D spatial navigation. A modeling program such as Blender, Max, Maya, etc., are some of the most complicated UI's ever designed -- they are probably tied with the cockpit of a planes. Guess what, they all don't use a 3D UI.
This is almost as stupid as voice navigation -- invisible interfaces are likewise inefficient.
Re:Oh brother -- more idiotic 3D UI (Score:3)
When it came time for an (almost) complete novice to navigate a complex theme park security system to lock it down before a velocaraptor ate her for dinner, what type of UI did they use? A friggin 3D UI on a Unix system [youtube.com]. If it's good enough in that case, it's good enough anywhere.
Re:Oh brother -- more idiotic 3D UI (Score:2)
Thank you for that insight, Captain Obvious.
The continuing wimpification of system admin (Score:5, Insightful)
Once upon a time, a BOFH would manage his system with a pistol [unm.edu]. If we KILL'ed a process, we'd loot its shotgun and be even more feared. It was brutal, bloody, and cruel. The way system administration is supposed to be. "root, red in tooth and claw."
Now? Minecraft. And not a good PvP server, either. I'll bet they don't even have TNT or skeleton archers, either. "Creative mode". My 9-year-olds sneer at creative mode. No bloodshed. No mayhem. Nothing to lose.
Pretty soon, it'll be VM management by buying outfits for Hello Kitty in Hello Kitty Container Adventure.
DO NOT WAAAANT!
Re:The continuing wimpification of system admin (Score:0)
omg i wish i had mod points for you!
Re:The continuing wimpification of system admin (Score:0)
This post made my... week, actually.
BZZZZT! Wrong! (Score:2)
No it doesn't.
is allowing the needful to be being done (Score:2)
Correction: no it isn't.
Do you shake (I mean are you shaking) - your head from side to side as you are writing?
Re:is allowing the needful to be being done (Score:2)
Re:is allowing the needful to be being done (Score:2)
You know how it goes ... slow news day, not enough coffee ...
I'd use it (Score:2)
I've never played minecraft but I'm a huge fan of garrys mod and space engineers. I'd use this, but only for my small home network. Its impractical but fun, which is perfect for hobby grade stuff.
I.can't imagine myself using it in any professional capacity and I can't see how it would be easier than what we have now.
Re:I'd use it (Score:2)
I'm not saying that this kind of thing will take off, but I will point out that pretty much every innovation that ever took off started with someone saying exactly this kind of thing about it.
Re:I'd use it (Score:2)
it's also a wide open invitation for someone more imaginative than I to point out how it could be practical. This is a message forum after all ;)
Re:I'd use it (Score:2)
I can see setup networks of interconnected containers using a Minecraft-style GUI as easier than using vi to set up docker-composer files.
What worries me is that it also allows easy visualization of the resulting constructs meaning that PHBs will think that that means they understand them.
Help me! (Score:0)
I accidentally sent Minecraft to my 3D printer and now it won't stop printing!
Re:Help me! (Score:0)
Quick, log into your Minecraft interface for docker and issue a kill print command to your printer.
So I need java or windows only to admin? (Score:2)
So I need java or windows only to admin?
Maybe it's better then the flash only vsphere (for now). Qemu / libvirt can be done with CLI.
Re:So I need java or windows only to admin? (Score:2)
Minecraft requires java, yes, but it runs just fine on Linux.
Re:So I need java or windows only to admin? (Score:2)
From the Docker website:"Because the Docker daemon uses Linux-specific kernel features, you can’t run Docker natively in Windows. Instead, you must use docker-machine to create and attach to a Docker VM on your machine. This VM hosts Docker for you on your Windows system [docker.com]."
Re:So I need java or windows only to admin? (Score:0)
i was kind of planning to fork this and build a libvirt version of it for fun and exercise :P
some one watched too much jurassic park (Score:0)
"it's a Unix system, I know this".
oh no, its minecraft, close enough.
1993 - 2015 (Score:1)
2015 jurassic World X : This is Minecraft, I know this
Re:1993 - 2015 (Score:0)
Amazingly, the interface Lex used was not constructed for the film. That was real. Ahh, SGI.
Re:1993 - 2015 (Score:2)
Re:1993 - 2015 (Score:1)
what could go wrong? (Score:0)
Jurassic Park had this technology, it worked wonders for them!
http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Jurassic-Park-screenshot.jpg
Oracle and SAP should jump on this.... (Score:0)
I definitely want to see my Oracle DBA's managing complex databases and replication via blocks and 3d environments in Minecraft...
I just can just hear it now...
"You put a lava bucket in the which furnace?" "Hey guys, a customer just said they lost their DB connection, and are getting 'object does not exist' errors"
"Ya, that's because this SOB put a lava bucket in the Oracle Financials furnace"
"Oh shit, that told Oracle Financials to drop the schema"
Disclosure! (Score:2)
Better link to the actual project (Score:1)
Reminds me of a Tom Clancy book (Score:2)
There was a scene in a Tom Clancy book where a computer-geek super-agent had the task of tracking down a terrorist's email traffic. So, did he hack into a mail server using a terminal window and download logs?
No. He put on a VR headset, booted up his favourite Wild West metaphor, moseyed into town (literally; he spent time walking), went into the local post office (a metaphor for a mail server) and used his fingers to leaf through virtual paper records.
I've read one Dan Brown book and one Tom Clancy book, and the Tom Clancy was by the far the most awful.
Re:Reminds me of a Tom Clancy book (Score:2)
To be fair, it sounds like you read one of those "Op Center by Tom Clancy" style books, where if you look at the fine print he came up with the basic setting and the actual author is someone you've never heard of they're using to cash in a bit more on the marketing power of his name.
Re:Reminds me of a Tom Clancy book (Score:2)
Huh. That explains a lot, because I really liked (the movies based on) his other books. I owe Mr Clancy a posthumous apology for assuming it was him who wrote the execrable chapter where the heavily-muscled assassin goes for a work-out at the gym and two other heavily muscled men admire him and compliment his physique. Or the subplot where the son of one of the lead characters is hinted to be involved to be in a nefarious plot, a thread which goes nowhere, then overcomes his abandonment issues by discovering his love of Frisbee(tm).
TL:DR; the book sucked, and I'm still bitter about the hours I wasted reading it.
IBM: Minecraft for WebSphere Admin (Score:2)
IBM has had a Minecraft admin console [ibm.com] for WebSphere for several years.