Comment by gmonaco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmonaco | Hacker News Reader

I've been checking out all of this new stuff recently, like http://www.packer.io and http://www.coreos.com. It all seems cool, but I can't help but think it's too little too late.

I want to deploy at the application level, not the OS image level. The abstraction that I want is:

Servers: Something that runs applications. Could be a physical server, an instance on EC2, or a local process, etc.

Applications: My code. Black boxes.

I want to be able to boot up a new server and throw some applications on it, like a new MongoDB shard or whatever. Then tear some applications down, or tear whole servers down.

And I want it all to be managed by a RESTful API over HTTP so that I can write a script to automate deployment, and even automate the scaling of my service.

I think you can do it with just Docker, a bare Linux distro, and a few scripts.

Does this exist yet?

You pretty much just defined the goal of Docker. And it's already incredibly close to what you describe.

Right. So when can I write:

    shards = []

    boot 'ec2', 'us-east-1', (server) ->
        shards.push server.start 'mongod_docker_image'

    boot 'ec2', 'us-west-1', (server) ->
        shards.push server.start 'mongod_docker_image'

    setTimeout ->
        shard.stop() for shard in shards
    , 5 * 60 * 1000

Does this exist yet? I started writing my own earlier today with Docker because I haven't found anything yet.

The plan is to cook a single ami that can be deployed ad infinitum. The image only has a slave application on it that receives and runs Docker images.

Pretty much.

A Docker AMI Generator exists. DigitalOcean offers an out of box Docker host. OpenShift will replace cartidges with Docker. OpenStack can provision Docker containers. Other PaaS/IaaS are in the works.

Running a registry is as simple as `docker run samalba/docker-registry`.

Pushing to that registry is very simple, especially if you have a reverse proxy ( I use hipache. Mine is registry.stinemat.es )

So, assuming those first 3 are in use in a 'convenient' way (as defined by you) - your request exists today. That matter of convenience will grow.

I would like to test out clustering and distributed computing on the cheap with a group of friends. So I would like to replicate an IaaS/PaaS/SaaS stack with vagrant-mesos-docker. I can then update my friends applications, OSs, and use their extra storage for a VPN service?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com