[Swlug] Docker, containers, oh my!

[Steve Talbot]

On 26/04/17 09:50, Matt Willsher via Swlug wrote:
> Yes, I think it’s trading one set of problems for another. While Ansible has it’s challenges - global variables being the worst, I think - at least everything about the workflow is familiar. It’s installing apps, configuring them via a template, and so on. Docker and rkt do lend themselves to dynamic configuration generation. For example, it’s possible to have a container lookup other running web services on a machine via env var and configure endpoints accordingly, but it raises security issues as it requires access to the docker daemon socket. Configuration management could be done using a service discovery daemon such as consul, etcd or even redis or a DB, but then that’s more stuff to run.

Hi everyone,

Just to share an experience of a project, where the team decided to
migrate from EC2 and Vagrant (configured via Ansible) to Docker
containers (configured via a combination of the Dockerfile and
Ansible).  I think the move was driven by frustration, and they thought
Docker would make their lives simpler; but they just ended up replacing
one set of frustrations with another.

In my current company we're using Ansible and Packer to build Vagrant
VMs (in dev environment) and EC2 AMIs (in staging and production), and
we swap out the entire instance when we update something significant. 
That works pretty well for us.

Cheers,
Steve