Containership: A simple, distributed container management platform | Hacker News Reader

Containership: A simple, distributed container management platform

containership.io

49 pointsjosegonzalez36 comments

Open articleView on HN

This webpage has a weird bug where the boxes listing the features are laid out oddly. I'm on firefox 39.0 w/linux.

https://i.imgur.com/3Jo3E7g.png

Same issue here. Safari 9.0 on OS X 10.11 (Beta 3).

Thanks; we will certainly get this fixed up!

Your feature images are not consistent aspect ratio (particularly the heights) causing the floats to drop.

Aside: Why are your images 2600 wide anyway? Killing our mobile quotas with your fancy 4k monitors, yo.

Interesting business model. It's like Segment.io for containers!

Thanks!

How are you guys different from Mesosphere please?

You have an advantage over them Mesosphere now to as https://digitalocean.mesosphere.com/ has been deprecated. Shame as both companies had partnership & put out lots of press releases about it. Silly as DO just had $83m funding.

ContainerShip, the open source software, is different in a few ways.

* Automatic clustering of nodes. Follower nodes should automatically find and cluster with existing nodes.

* Out-of-the-box load balancing via on a port generated when an application is created.

* Built-in service discovery which easily allows you to communicate with other applications running on your cluster.

* Easy extensibility provided through a plugin system. For instance, the open-source web-ui where users can interact with their cluster is simply a plugin on top of the core ContainerShip software.

ContainerShip Cloud offers more compelling differences such as:

* Automatic installation on your favorite cloud provider with a few clicks (constantly adding new providers). As well as the ability to scale your cluster (leader & follower nodes) directly from ContainerShip cloud when additional capacity is needed.

* Point-in-time backups of the entire state of your cluster, including all applications and any persistent data being written to a volume.

* Restoration of backups to the same cluster, or an entirely different ContainerShip cluster you are running on any cloud (or on-prem).

Even more features are currently in the works. I hope this helps.

Helpful. Thanks for the feedback :)

What do the base hardware requirements look like for this? I ask because we originally were going to use Deis for container deployment automation but then found out that they want a minimum of 8GB of ram just to run it (that's before even running any containers).

containership has two modes it can run in: leader & follower

You'll need at least one leader host for the cluster to function, and a minimum of 3 for true high availability.

Follower hosts are where your containers will actually be placed and will run. The specs on these servers should be great enough to fit all of the containers/applications you plan to run.

For a small test deployment with under 10 followers, you can get away with running your leaders on the smallest DigitalOcean droplets without any problems. Once you get up into larger number of follower hosts the hardware requirements of the leaders will change, but not significantly.

Isn't this just another way of lock-in? Now instead of using an open source solution or some some other open source management platform, you are now dependent on this company to manage your docker instances. Am I missing something here?

It seems like their technology is open source, or at least some of it: https://github.com/containership

there's not exactly a lot of code going on in either http://github.com/containership/containership or http://github.com/containership/containership.core

Kinda confusing as to whether or not this exists/works..

I can assure you that this actually exists and works! :)

"containership" is made up of a handful of other repos.

More details here: https://docs.containership.io/docs/architectural-overview

If you're looking for some meat, check out the repos linked from the above docs page, including: https://github.com/containership/legiond https://github.com/containership/praetor

Co-Founder here. containership is free and open source (https://github.com/containership/containership). You can run it in the cloud or on-prem behind your firewall. Our SaaS product, ContainerShip Cloud, allows users to launch clusters on providers with a few clicks, as well as backup the entire state of their cluster (including persistent data) for disaster recovery or to move between your Containership clusters with a click. Users still have direct access to docker.sock on their clusters, so everything is still under your control.

For some reason I thought this would be a shipping container management platform.

Having said that, I like it. I'll take a look and see if this could solve some of our problems.

This is interesting. As someone who doesn't have a whole lot of experience with most of these container solutions how similar is this to how kubernetes works?

There are core ContainerShip features that function similarly to how Kubernetes does. Both provide a cluster scheduler that places and manages containers across a group of servers. They ensures jobs are restarted if they fail, let you scale the number of containers for an app up or down, and make it so you can stop thinking about individual servers.

That feature set alone is awesome but it won't take you to the finish line, you'll end up needing to tack other projects on to get a fully working system when you use something like Kubernetes (and some other popular choices).

With ContainerShip we wanted to make it easy for people to get up and running without having to learn and glue together many different projects. We are trying to provide everything needed to run and scale your infrastructure anywhere in one package.

ContainerShip Cloud makes it easy to stand clusters up on various providers, backup your data, and easily migrate somewhere else.

Thanks! I've been meaning to do some testing with kubernetes so I'll make sure to add this to the list so I can understand it better.

Co-Founder present if anyone has questions!

Mobile interface for cloud site has no informational links fyi

Thank you! We will update ASAP!

Step 1 on https://medium.com/containership-articles/getting-started-gu... points to wrong domain

Thanks! This should be fixed!

Few questions please:

1) What OS is installed on the master/slave hosts? 2) When creating new cluster application, where is the image pulldown powered from? Tried molinto/nginx but could not select in dropdown. 3) How can we selected private docker repositories from DockerHub? 4) I have a 'containership/engine' in the application listings, is this required for things to run?

Thanks

When launching a cluster from ContainerShip Cloud, ubuntu is installed. You can install ContainerShip, the open source software by hand on any linux distro; we will be supporting more distros from the Cloud interface in the future.

The pulldown is powered from dockerhub search.

Private docker repositories with authentication are currently in the works.

containership/engine is the default image if one was not provided. It sounds like there may have been a bug when passing "molinto/nginx". Even if it does not autocomplete (it doesn't seem to find it using dockerhub search for me) passing that string in the Create modal should still set it correctly.

Is it fair to compare this to a self-hosted PAAS (ex. Dokku, Openshift Origin, etc)?

(just asking for my own understanding)

Comparing to a self-hosted PaaS is fair for the open source containership project.

It has built in high availability, automatic clustering of nodes, loadbalancing, service discovery, persistent data management, internal DNS, and support for easily extending the core of the system with plugins (plus more).

Of your examples I would say it is most like Openshift Origin. Dokku being mainly aimed at people running a single standalone server.

ContainerShip Cloud (https://cloud.containership.io) is a hosted service that lets you launch and scale ContainerShip clusters with a click across multiple providers. You can backup clusters, share them, and move them between clouds.

I wrote a getting started post that shows step by step how to use ContainerShip on DigitalOcean that may be of interest: https://medium.com/containership-articles/getting-started-gu...

How would you compare to Cloud Foundry? Sounds like a lot of overlap there too.

Is anyone even using CF anymore especially in production? The spring/tomcat jee based setup seems a bit antiquated when there are so many lighter weight alternatives available.

Cloud Foundry is mostly written in Ruby and Go.

New components are generally written in Go and several Ruby parts are being progressively replaced by Go parts (especially Diego).

Pivotal (my employers) sold $40 million of PCF in the first year of sales. So it's got a bit of traction here and there.

That's the first "Pricing" page I've seen that doesn't contain prices.

If the menu doesn't have prices, you probably can't afford it.

Does containership has any difference with last.backend?

I haven't checked out last backend in a while. From a quick look at their site I can say the following:

- ContainerShip is open source / Last Backend is not. The "brains" of the Last Backend system are managed by Last Backend and run on their servers. With ContainerShip all the critical components run on your own servers so if the centralized ContainerShip Cloud management system goes down, your systems keep working.. Not sure the same can be said for LB.

- ContainerShip already has a fully functional REST API & Command Line Interface for deploying/scaling/managing apps.

- ContainerShip Cloud allows you to do point in time snapshots of an entire cluster which you can then move between clouds/clone/etc.

There is probably more but I would need to dig further into their documentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com