Adventures in Docker-land

So, after some time away from IT, I’m mucking around in it again to see what seems interesting.

Got a pointer to Docker  from a friend and have been up to my ears ever since.  It’s in a similar vein to the stuff I got to play with when working with Nebula at NASA in the sense that it is a PaaS enabling environment.  It uses thinly provisioned servers (containers) with AUFS (and some support for a few others), so every operation during the image build process resides in a new, thin, COW layer.

This gives great advantages for caching and speeding up the build process.  Also, say you have 2 images that share the same common base build (i.e. apache server), but for one application, you need PHP and the other you need RUBY … build 2 different images from the same base, and instead of wasting 2x the disk space and build time, you have 1x + the difference for PHP in one image and RUBY in the other — and the build time is severely reduced!

Need 5x Apache+PHP servers?  Just run:

docker run -d -t geekmush/apache-php

5x or as many as you want.  There are lots of other options and Docker is being developed actively … and they have some great staff and supporters on #docker@irc.freenode.net!

It’s not worth trying to describe Docker here when they can do a much better job … go check out their website and the Googles!

I’m going to use my space for notes and tips and tricks that I’ve run into during my adventures this week.

Stay tuned!