Today I created my first Docker image. I’m really interested in Docker as a technology and I feel this should be one main route in virtualization field. The use of Docker is so easy and elegant that I wonder why it hasn’t existed for longer time. There still is big hype around Docker, especially now when they get $40M funding. With this Docker will become huge company.
Anyway I wanted to create some docker image for practice and bumped into Bob, signal-processing and machine-learning toolbox that I was describing in one of my previous articles. I had a problem then with compatibilty. Bob runs only under Ubuntu, Mac OSX and Arch Linux. I am happy Fedora user and didn’t want to install Ubuntu. Luckily developers offered a solution for this situation: Virtual Machine. On the other hand it is VM in VirtualBox which is under Oracle and run demanding computation in VM with limited memory isn’t the kind of performance I was looking for. We fortunately got access to school server then, but the problem with other platforms still remains.
So I created Docker image containing Bob and IPython. You can find it here. You can access to it directly to shell and run python scripts or you can start it as daemon with running IPython Notebook for development in your browser. Here is Dockerfile for build.