Ask HN: How to get the flexibilty of containers without the need for another OS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to get the flexibilty of containers without the need for another OS?

3 pointsp0d7 comments

I’m just a little guy who has two saas products as a sideline which make 1/4 of my income. My stack is nginx/php/mysql/jquery on lxc containers on cloud servers.

I like my setup but wonder if I could reduce my container experience even further so I don't need another OS on my host. Has anyone got a smaller footprint than my setup but with the flexibilty of containers?

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I don't follow. Lxc is a Linux thing, so you don't need more than one OS, just one Linux host. And if it really is just nginx + php + mysql, then you don't need containers at all and can just use a reverse proxy under nginx and have each app talk to a different database within MySQL. Deployment would just be copying over your code.

I'm really not sure what you're trying to optimize away here.

Each container needs managed i.e. packages updated and secured, just like the host. I was wondering if this could be reduced.

You could use a GCP GKE cluster. Then you wouldn't have to worry about anything under Kubernetes and likely have a simple deployment and update process.

Similarly you could use Azure Container Service too.

Edit: Just found out they are canning that in 2020. So K8S is the default Azure solution.

Thanks. I wondered about kubernetes but thought it may be overkill for my situation. I will have a look.

I find k8s makes having replicas available very, very tempting. Don't fall into it (I try not to, btw).

For me the good part is beign able to rollback a deployment... if you have a large base.

Also, be careful with what's inside your containers. Even small distros like Alpine have security bugs. Make sure you can upgrade the container with your app on in at least every 2-3 months (less is better, btw).

- Illumos/SmartOS has zones

- FreeBSD has jails

They’re both very well integrated into their respective operating systems.

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