Containerization for Production Services

Containerization is the idea that an application and all its dependencies can be packaged and shipped in a standardized way that is the same for any platform. This enables you, for example, to package a container you created and built on your development machine directly to a production server. Be aware that the container only needs the dependencies and code from your app; other systems (like, oh, the operating system) can be shared with the host environment via a Linux container. There are many, many tools in this rapidly emerging space, such as:

• CoreOS. CoreOS is a Linux distro built for running and manageing applications that are packaged as Docker images. The key components are:
  • Docker as the way you run apps.
  • etcd, which is a distributed key value database; it’s sort of the “registry” you can use to share data between instances. It’s bundled with the OS so that you can always count on it being there.
  • systemd, a distributed job system for scheduling and process management. I don’t really quite understand this yet but plan to dive in soon.
  • fleet. Fleet is a tool for managing processes on a CoreOS cluster.
• Deis. Deis is a self-hosted PaaS platform based on Docker and CoreOS. Basically, it allows you to create your own Heroku-like service based on buildpacks or “raw” Docker containers.
• Docker. Written in Go, Docker is an Open Source project that provides a clean and simple way to create system images based on a known filesystem, layer new elements onto those images, and then spin up running instances of what you’ve done. For example, you might start with a base images like “base/ubuntu”, add a service like Redis, and then start the image to have a running Redis instance. Docker handles process management, networking, and other services for you, allowing you to focus on adding just the parts you need. There is also a company called (conveniently enough) Docker that maintains Docker, as well as providing a hosting service called the Index, where you can publish and maintain your images. Like GitHub, they have a “free for public/paid for private” model.
• Flynn.io. Flynn, like Deis, provides a self-hosted PaaS.
• geard is a tool for creating and managing Docker containers in OpenShift, RedHast’s PaaS solution.
• kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source version of Google’s internal cluster management toolchain. You can use Kubernetes to run your own Docker containers on Google Compute Engine, Google’s cloud platform.
• Mesos. Apache Mesos is a cluster resource manager that simplifies running applications on a shared pool of servers. Mesos supports containerized workloads via linux cgroups and now supports running tasks in Docker containers natively as of August 2014 with the release of version 0.20.0.
• Panamax. “Panamax is a containerized app creator with an open-source app marketplace hosted in GitHub. Panamax provides a friendly interface for users of Docker, Fleet & CoreOS. With Panamax, you can easily create, share and deploy any containerized app no matter how complex it might be”