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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

While we're on the topic can anyone recommend a system for rolling out (Java) applications across server farms that doesn't use containers? We have a bunch of shell scripts that are pretty horrible.

We could containerize, but we dont need that right now.

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I know it's counter to your question, but it really is quite trivial to containerise a java app, for example:

  FROM openjdk:8u92-jdk-alpine
  COPY file.jar file.jar

  CMD java -Duser.timezone=UTC -cp file.jar com.foo

and to stay on-topic, you can run java apps in mesos without a docker wrapper :)

Ansible. It isn't perfect, but is far better than shell scripts for application deployment.

This is what I use. Other players include Puppet, Salt, and Chef

Distelli. It'll be a direct translation of your shell scripts to their format. I've had a great experience with them.

I haven't used it, but Nomad has specific support for Java apps.

From their site: Nomad has extensible support for task drivers, allowing it to run containerized, virtualized, and standalone applications. Users can easily start Docker containers, VMs, or application runtimes like Java.

The Java driver is documented here: https://www.nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/java.html

I don't get it. Containerizing your apps will help with many things including reliable rollouts. It's trivial to containerize a Java app. Do you just not want to learn about containers?

Using a container orchestrator for deployment is pretty much better than using a CM tool in every way... and it's certainly better than trying to half-ass one with bash scripts.

It is not always trivial to get buy in from your manager to shift your entire datacenter to running docker, or db admins, or the other dev teams, nor might it be trivial to tell the ops guys to go figure out how to run it.

If you are all of the above yourself - tings are much easier

NixOps?

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