The hot potato in the room of Containerized solutions is persistent services. Stateless applications are easy and trivial, but to deploy a persistent services like ElasticSearch is a totally different ball game. In this blog post we will show you how easy it is on this platform to create ElasticSearch clusters. The key to the easiness is the ability to lookup external ip addresses and port numbers of all cluster members in Consul and the reusable power of the CoreOS unit file templates. The presented solution is a ready-to-use ElasticSearch component for your application.

This solution:

• uses empheral ports so that we can actually run multiple ElasticSearch nodes on the same host
• mounts persistent storage under each node to prevent data loss on server crashes
• uses the power of the CoreOS unit template files to deploy new ElasticSearch clusters.

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Providing High Availability to stateless applications is pretty trivial as was shown in the previous blog posts A High Available Docker Container Platform and Rolling upgrade of Docker applications using CoreOS and Consul. But how does this work when you have a persistent service like Redis?

In this blog post we will show you how a persistent service like Redis can be moved around on machines in the cluster, whilst preserving the state. The key is to deploy a fleet mount configuration into the cluster and mount the storage in the Docker container that has persistent data.

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In the previous blog post we showed you how to setup a High Available Docker Container Application platform using CoreOS and Consul. In this short blog post, we will show you how easy it is to perform a rolling upgrade of a deployed application.

(Updated – june 2nd 2015 – removed consul-http-loadbalancer-lb from the Vagrant architecture)
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Docker containers are hot, but containers in themselves are not very interesting. It needs an eco-system to make it into  24×7 production deployments. Just handing your container names to operations, does not cut it.

In the blog post, we will show you how  CoreOS can be used to provide a High Available Docker Container Platform as a Service, with a box standard way to deploy Docker containers. Consul is added to the mix to create a lightweight HTTP Router to any docker application offering a HTTP service.

We will be killing a few processes and machine on the way to prove our point…
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Cloud Foundry is a wonderful on-premise PaaS  that makes it very easy to build, deploy while providing scalability and high availability to your stateless applications. But Cloud Foundry is really a Application Platform Service and does not provide high availability and scalability for your data. Fortunately, there is Amazon RDS, which excels in providing this as a service.

In this blog I will show you how easy it is to build, install and use a Cloud Foundry Service Broker for Amazon RDS.  The broker was developed in Node.JS using the Restify framework and can be deployed as a normal Cloud Foundry application. Finally,  I will point you to a skeleton service broker which you can use as the basis for your own.

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Docker reached production status a few months ago. But having the container technology alone is not enough. You need a complete platform infrastructure before you can deploy your docker application in production. Amazon AWS offers exactly that: a production quality platform that offers capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, and application health monitoring for Docker applications.

In this blog, you will learn how to deploy a Docker application to production in five easy steps.

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If you have every tried to start a docker container and keep it running, you must have encountered the problem that this is no easy task. Most stuff I like to start in container are things like http servers, application servers and various other middleware components which tend to have start scripts that daemonize the program. Starting a single process is a pain, starting multiple processes becomes nasty. My advise is to use monit to start all but the most simple Docker application containers! When I found monit while delving through the inner works Cloud Foundry, I was ecstatic about it! It was so elegant, small, fast, with a beautiful DSL that I thought it was the hottest thing since sliced bread! I was determined to blog it off the roof tops. Until…. I discovered that the first release dated from somewhere in 2002. So it was not hot and new; Clearly I had been lying under a UNIX rock for quite a while. This time, the time was right to write about it! Read more →

Dockerfiles are great and easily readable specifications for the installation and configuration of an application. It is terse, can be understood by anyone who understands UNIX commands, results in a testable product and can easily be turned into an automated installation script using a little awk’ward magic. Just in case you want to install the application in question on the good old fashioned way, without the Docker hassle 🙂
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The world of on-premise private PaaSes is changing rapidly. A few years ago, we were building on on-premise private PaaSes based upon the existing infrastructure and using Puppet as an automation tool to quickly provision new application servers.  We provided a self-service portal where development teams could get any type of server in any type of environment running within minutes.  We created a virtual server for each application to keep it manageable, which of course is quite resource intensive.

Since June 9th, Docker has been declared production ready, so this opens  the option of provisioning light weight containers to the teams instead of full virtual machine. This will increase the speed of provisioning even further while reducing the cost of creating a platform and minimising resource consumption.

To illustrate how easy life is becoming, we are going to deploy an original CloudFoundry node.js application to Docker on a CoreOS cluster. This hands-on experiment is based on MacOS, Vagrant and VirtualBox.
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Deployit’s Cloud Pack provides you with the ability to create and destroy environments on virtualized infrastructure from Deployit. It supports both EC2 and vSphere. In this first part of the tutorial, I am going to show you how to setup Amazon AWS and populate the Deployit repository in such a way that you can create and destroy virtual machines  from the Deployit console.
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