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Comment by phildougherty | Hacker News Reader

ContainerShip co-founder here. Happy to answer any questions. We're working on producing Docker images for every major database that provide the same simple scaling and management.

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This looks like a neat product but until/unless its multi-DC and capable of mixing cloud/bare metal deploys I'm not sure if I see the appeal. Automation tools for simplistic scenarios are [frankly] widely available.

Single DC or AWS is honestly a very, very simple use case that I'd honestly question a decision to use an ops tool when you don't understand the underlying technology well enough to deploy a LAN cluster.

So today it is single data center in the case of everything but AWS. We allow you to automatically launch a ContainerShip cluster in AWS using https://cloud.containership.io. During setup you select a VPC ID, Subnet IDs, Security Groups, and AZs to launch into. In the near future we are going to fulfill your desires as we are working on features that let you easily span multiple providers or migrate between them.

What's the use case for deploying a database in a container instead of a VM? If I want dedicated resources for my database (anything else would be undesirable in a live production environment), that implies running it on a dedicated host.

There are various important use cases. One of them is that people want to use the same workflow when deploying their databases that they get when deploying their apps. It is possible to use our Tags system to force your database containers to live on systems with a special hardware configuration. Additionally you could configure the database application in ContainerShip to utilize all of the available resources on a given follower host or hosts, forcing them to run single tenant.

This is great, and I look forward to seeing many other databases packaged in this way (Mongo, please?)

Question: do you do any ongoing operation & maintenance on the cluster, or is this just initial setup?

There is ongoing management and maintenance of the ContainerShip cluster itself, but not for the Cassandra cluster per se. You can push out a new version of the docker image for your applications or roll them back if you need to upgrade. You can easily scale the cluster up or down as necessary. Is there a particular management feature you'd really like to see?

Edit: typo

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