Snappy Ubuntu Core on the Cloudhelix platform

Snappy Ubuntu Core is a minimal, transactionally-updated server image?—?it’s now available as an OVA file, so we thought we’d give it a test.

Snappy is extended with frameworks (such as docker)?—?these are then used to run your applications. Transactional updates mean updates can be easily applied, and easily rolled back. For more information: https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/

We wrote a blog post about CoreOS a while back (found here)?—?it’s great to see more innovation and choice in the fashionable area of container management!

The OVA is available here: http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-core/devel/core/current/devel-core-amd64-cloud.ova. As shown, it is a development release?—?so a few tweaks may be required to get everything working smoothly!

For example?—?we weren’t able to get the OVA imported straight away?—?we received the following error:

The OVF package is invalid and cannot be deployed.
The following manifest file entry (line 1) is invalid

However?—?all was not lost, thanks to VMware’s ovftool?—?details here: https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/ovf/

With this, we were able to convert the OVA back to VMX, then back to OVF.

After this we were able to import the OVF?—?it has now been added as into our vCloud catalog, just in case anyone fancies testing it. In this development release, the default user is ubuntu with the password also ubuntu.

The command ‘snappy versions’ can be used to check the initial status:

We can then install a framework (docker) and a hello-world app:

This is then reflected when checking with ‘snappy versions’ or ‘snappy info’:

As shown, a core update (144) is available?—?let’s update this, using ‘snappy update ubuntu-core’:

After a reboot, the new version is active and we can choose to roll back if we notice any problems:

Pretty cool and a great demo of transactional updates. What do you think about the exciting new world of container management? Let us know!