SeaGL speaker Q&A: James Cooper

James Cooper gives his talk titled, “Distributed Systems With Docker Swarm” on Friday afternoon.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I’m a freelance software engineer based in Seattle. My current focus is infrastructure and devops automation and I have been using Docker in production systems for almost three years.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: The talk will be a very practical overview of how to use Docker Swarm to deploy and upgrade a system composed of multiple services. In particular I’ll explore how to deploy upgrades with zero downtime and how to use compose to declaratively express the containers Swarm should start in order to fully stand up a complete system.

A demo of the system will be provided along with a companion GitHub repository with all the code. My hope is that attendees will learn enough about Swarm from the talk to feel comfortable exploring the documentation in detail online later and possibly using it to deploy their own projects.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: I attended SeaGL two years ago and had a great time. I enjoyed the do-it-yourself spirit of the conference and found the talks were generally of very high quality. It was also a treat to see Richard Stallman talk in person. I’m excited to be a part of the 2017 SeaGL.

Q: What prerequisite knowledge is required for the talk?

A: I don’t plan to get very technical with regards to the implementation of Docker and Swarm so this talk should be accessible to almost anyone with an interest in containers. Prior knowledge of Docker will be helpful, but my hope is that those completely unfamiliar with containers should also be able to follow along as well.