Multipass Local Virtual Machines

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Bret and Nirmal are joined by Chris Townsend, the engineering manager for Canonical's Multipass team, to discuss how to use Multipass as the easiest local virtual machine for Docker, Kubernetes and more!

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Multipass is my go-to solution for quickly creating local virtual machines of Ubuntu. I teach it in my courses, I've used it for many years, and I was excited to have Chris on to talk about the ways to automate the creation of a VM in Multipass, and dig into the various virtualization, backends and networking options. 

We also talk about Multipass blueprints where in a demo, he shows off how to create a VM with Docker installed in a single command. It actually reminds me of Docker Machine, if you've been around a while. That also mounts your code directly into the VM and sets a host alias so that the Docker commands will pass through to Docker in the VM transparently.

If you can imagine that it basically means that you can run Docker in the VM and use it from the host as if it isn't in a VM. And then we had some great audience questions about various features of Multipass and how to use it for multi-node clustering and exposing VMs to your local network.

Live recording of the complete show from September 21, 2023 is on YouTube (Ep. #235). Includes demos.

★Topics★
Multipass website

  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (01:42) - Introducing Chris Townsend
  • (02:43) - Multipass Elevator Pitch
  • (07:10) - Getting Started with Multipass
  • (16:11) - Interacting with an Instance
  • (18:21) - Changing Image Storage Location
  • (19:32) - Does Multipass work with Hyper-V Cluster?
  • (22:29) - Expose the Internal Bridge Network via Multipass
  • (29:14) - The Future of Multipass

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Creators and Guests

Bret Fisher
Host
Bret Fisher
Cloud native DevOps Dude. Course creator, YouTuber, Podcaster. Docker Captain and CNCF Ambassador. People person who spends too much time in front of a computer.
Nirmal Mehta
Host
Nirmal Mehta
Principal Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Beth Fisher
Producer
Beth Fisher
Producer of the DevOps and Docker Talk and Agentic DevOps podcasts. Assistant producer on Bret Fisher Live show on YouTube. Business and proposal writer by trade.
Cristi Cotovan
Editor
Cristi Cotovan
Video editor and educational content producer. Descript and Camtasia coach.
Multipass Local Virtual Machines
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