Zero to Peanut Butter Docker Time in 78 Seconds | Hacker News Reader

Zero to Peanut Butter Docker Time in 78 Seconds

developer.rackspace.com

33 pointsjulien42127 comments

Yo dawg, I have a question; I have two tabs open to developer.rackspace.com and both posts contain multiple "image macro" type memes and phrases such as "I'm going to ride the command line like a cowboy". Do y'all really talk like that or do you just assume everyone else does? I'm 31 and love me some internet pablum but I don't want to see it everywhere. Sometimes the internet really is serious business, right?

On topic, I've been spending some time looking at Docker this morning because there seems to be a lot of buzz around it. I am winding this exploration down for the moment because I am discovering that for all the talk about how easy and fast Docker makes things, the list of what you can do with it today amounts to:

- Postgresql - redis - mysql, apache and sshd Wordpress stack - nginx, php and Wordpress

[sic]

So, right now aside from the dubious differentiator of being able to spin up an SSD-hosted WordPress instance in 78 seconds, Docker doesn't seem to be very compelling. I will certainly keep an eye on it though.

The tone and images were all me - and I definitely pushed the edges here (I was aiming for fun) - my previous post while having a little bit of fun, stayed on topic:

http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to-performance-c...

As for your docker thoughts - I'll let the docker team address those more fully.

Docker is a tool that you can use to package and deploy your own apps as well.

http://i.imgur.com/noD9Cgm.png

Docker provides a container for simplified virtualization. You can put anything in it you want.

This image describe my feelings:

http://developer.rackspace.com/images/2013-11-11-peanut-butt...

Why not just come up with a sane deployment strategy instead of hacking LXC to do it?

While Docker is interesting, we've been doing the same thing with OpenVZ for years now, minus a lot of the hype. Containerization is great but it's being applied to the wrong problem.

As a Linux admin, the claim that it's 'Portable' really irks me. Portable, in this context, is misleading, as it normally implies your application can run on different CPU Architectures. Apple's Universal Binaries were portable. Docker is not portable. It doesn't even support a large number of Linux distros. Good luck running it on FreeBSD or OS X without a lot of headache.

Docker relies on AuFS instead of a more modern COW filesystem like ZFS or btrfs.

Troubleshooting this in production will be a pain (no way to meter IOPS, no support for IPv6, unsupported filesystem, huge security risks over real virtualization).

Hmm, that 8gb RAM/8vCPU offering in the performance 1 group is interesting. And, a good price point too. I really wish AWS had a similar offering.

I might need to take a look at this. Does Rackspace also provide similar services like Elasticache, RDS, ELB and CloudFront?

We have Cloud Queues, DNS/cloud load balancers, and Akamai CDN built into our Cloud Files system. We don't have have an elasticache equivalent at the moment

Hello, I'm the author of the OP, And as always, I'm around to answer any questions.

Please never act professional! That post is awesome.

I will not lie, I felt kind of silly opening the page at work and did the quick ctrl+1 to switch to a tab when a coworker walked by my office!

Aside from that, I have had a recent interest in Docker, LXC and QVD. Thanks for the information, jnoller. I have been doing the reading (without the typing), but this just reassured me that I am on the right path. The Docker part rolls in for segregating applications from each other. In case one app gets compromised, they do not all fall down. Another interest is hitting a few compliance standards by utilizing LXC on its own. Finally, virtualization with QVD and LXC.

I'm digging "Peanut Butter Docker Time". Crunchy. :)

Please tell me that "Performance Cloud Servers" are not the official response to the issue of normal servers being created very slooooowwwwly... The time spent in BUILDING is really annoying. Are you planning to improve those?

You should take a look at this: http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/welcome-to-performance-c...

I know the performance servers improve it, but I'm specifically asking about the standard flavors. On your competitor's system for comparison (standard image, smallest flavor, no bonus payments):

    $ time nova boot ....
    0.24s user 0.04s system 1% cpu 20.724 total
    $ nova console-log
    Cloud-init v. 0.7.3 finished at Mon, 11 Nov 2013 19:08:50 +0000. Datasource DataSourceEc2.  Up 54.42 seconds

In practice that means <1min until the machine is ssh-able.

Smallest non-performance instance in rackspace ORD: around 5 minutes until ACTIVE.

As it says in the post - the prices of the performance instances is lower than the standard flavors, and we will be phasing out the standard (Non Performance) flavors as we complete the rollout to all data centers.

Sorry, but that's just marketing speak. Eliminating $16 option and making $29 the new lowest one is not lowering prices. I'm running a number of smallest servers, so it's just going to cost me 2x the total price.

Ok, here goes:

> Ok, so I’m going to ride the command line like a cowboy

That's a lot of kool-aid in a short sentence. Note, I'd rather have this over "Rackspace is the market-leading solution provider in the containerized virtualization space, empowered by award-winning Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) products such as Docker and LXC", but I do feel that you're pushing it a bit far in this post, here and there.

Yeah - I agree, I pushed some edges in the post - I'll keep that in mind. Thank you.

Ha, actually, I genuinely wonder: How did you feel when you wrote that you were going to ride the command line like a cowboy? :-)

Well, I moved to Texas in June and haven't really gone native yet, so I needed something to help me fit in.

Welcome to Texas! The winter will be a lot more fun than the summer was.

while docker seems really awesome for development, all articles i've read so far stop at the point where things run, but are not yet really production ready: your article ends with running django in a docker container, which is really cool - but on a random? nat'ed port.

what would be the next steps to actually expose this django container to the public via port 80 and surviving a host server reboot?

When you start the container you can specify which port you want using the -p command.

This command would start it on port 8000, but you could change to any other port you want, assuming it is free.

$ docker run -d -p :8000 kencochrane/django-docker

I'm also pretty sure that when your host is restarted the container will start back up when docker does, if the container was running before the host was restarted.

Docker is starting to get about as much unwarranted hype as Node.js did. Yawn... It's nothing more than hipsterware.

Docker containers are fairly impressive due to the sheer number you can host on hardware versus full fledged VMs.

Why is it unwarranted? Care to add some substance to your comment?

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