Why use containers?

Containers, and the supporting orchestration platforms, are increasingly popular tools for deploying applications. This article focuses on why you would want to use a container ecosystem. While there are many reasons, including portability and reduced boot times (compared to VMs), this article concentrates on security and cost.

We will focus on Docker, since it is by far the most dominant container, and on Kubernetes, since it seems to have “won” against alternatives such as Swarm and Mesos.

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Tags: containers, continuousdeployment, docker, k8s, kube, kubernetes

Using Docker with a maven project

If you have a maven project, there are a plethora of ways to enable it to run within a docker container.

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Tags: containers, docker, helloworld, Maven, mvn, springboot

Docker talk at SVCC’15

Some short notes from a talk from Ted Young on the Docker ecosystem. Slides available here.

BusyBox – a number of use linux tools packaged up in to a single file. “The Swiss Army knife of Embedded Linux”

CoreOS and Red Hat’s Atomic are particularly suited for running containers, work well with (and I think even come preinstalled with) Docker.

VM vs Container. VMs ofter have multiple apps running in them (e.g. a tomcat with multiple apps running it int). With containers it is typically 1 app per container. Containers typically run within a VM (although can run on “raw metal” too). Multiple containers per VM? – I’m not so clear on!

Cgroups may be used to limit and control resource usage.

12 Factor apps – Good practices for building “cloud native” or software-as-a-service apps.

 

Tags: codecamp, containers, docker, svcc, svcc15