14 DAY TRIAL // This past weekend, the developers of the popular Docker open-source application container engine have published the first Release Candidate (RC) snapshot of the upcoming Docker 1.13.0 release.
Docker 1.13.0 promises to be a major release, and the changelog of the first RC build is already huge, suggesting numerous build improvements, such as the ability to specify images that can be used as a cache source during build, the implementation of an experimental option for squashing image layers to the FROM image after a successful build, as well as step number support and "--network " option to the "docker build" command.
There's also support for compressing the build context when building an image, and unused build-args are now permitted. Moreover, it looks like Docker 1.13.0 will add DEB and RPM builder for the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) and Fedora 25 operating systems respectively, along with support for building Docker Debian packages (DEBs) for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) distro on IBM System z (s390x) and PowerPC (PPC) 64-bit architectures.
Swarm Mode gains secret management
RPM builder support for VMWare's Linux-based Photon operating system will be available as well in Docker 1.13.0, along with shell completion for tgz. Of course, Docker 1.13.0 will also ship with lots of improvements to the Swarm Mode feature, such as a new secret management functionality, windows named pipe swarm-mode support on Microsoft Windows operating systems, support for labels on volumes, and the ability to filtering volumes by label.
Among other interesting features, we can notice that Docker 1.13.0 will support local NFS (Network File System) volumes for the resolve hostnames functionality, better SELinux labeling of container-shared volumes, implementation of XFS quota for overlay2, the ability to dynamically reload authorization plugins, as well as numerous networking and Remote API improvements. Also, support for the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) and Fedora 22 operating system will be deprecated.