Today: February 14, 2025 9:35 pm
A collection of Software and Cloud patterns with a focus on the Enterprise

Tag: docker


Container orchestration is at the heart of a successful container architecture. Orchestration takes as input a definition of how a deployed application should look. This usually includes how many containers for a certain image are needed, volumes for persistent data, networking for communication between containers and awareness of various discovery mechanisms. Discovery may include such things as identifying other containers which are also participating with the application or how to access services required by the running containers. Here’s a high level view. Infrastructure Containers need infrastructure to run. Both virtual and physical infrastructure......

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What is Cloud Native?

I hear a lot of people talking about cloud native applications these days. This includes technologists and business managers. I have found that there really is a spectrum of meaning for the term cloud native and that two people rarely mean the same thing when they say cloud native. At one end of the spectrum would be running a traditional workload on a virtual machine. In this scenario the virtual host may have been manually provisioned, manually configured, manually deployed, etc. It’s cloudiness comes from the fact that it’s a virtual machine running......

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The Road to PaaS

I have observed that discussions about CloudFoundry often lack accurate context. Some questions I get that indicate context is missing include: What Java version does CloudFoundry support? What database products/versions are available How can I access the server directly? There are a few reasons that the questions above are not relevant for CloudFoundry (or any modern PaaS environment). To understand why, it’s important to understand how we got to PaaS and where we came from. Landscape When computers were first becoming a common requirement for the enterprise, most applications were monolithic. All applicaiton......

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I’m about to write a few articles about creating buildpacks for Stackato, which is a derivative of CloudFoundry and the technology behind Helion Development Platform. The approach for deploying nginx in docker as part of a buildpack differs from the approach I published previously. There are a few reasons for this: Stackato discourages root access to the docker image All services will run as the stackato user The PORT to which services must bind is assigned and in the free range (no root required) Get a host setup to run docker The easiest......

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I’ve been reviewing Docker recently. As part of that review, I decided to build a LEMP stack in Docker. I use Vagrant to create an environment in which to run Docker. For this experiment I chose to create Buildfiles to create the Docker container images. I’ll be discussing the following files in this post. Vagrantfile bootstrap.sh mysql/Dockerfile mysql/mysqlpwdseed nginx/Dockerfile nginx/default nginx/wall.phpVagrantfile bootstrap.sh mysql/Dockerfile mysql/mysqlpwdseed nginx/Dockerfile nginx/default nginx/wall.php Download the Docker LEMP files as a zip (docker-lemp.zip). Spin up the Host System I start with Vagrant to spin up a host system for my......

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The most strikingly different characteristic of Docker, when compared to other deployment platforms, is the single responsibility per container Design (although some see it differently). One reason this looks so different is that many application developers view the complete software stack on which they deploy as a collection of components on a single logical server. For developers of larger applications, who already have experience deploying distributed stacks, the security and configuration complexity of Docker may feel more familiar. Docker brings a fresh approach to distributed stacks; one that may seem overly complex for......

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