Re: Nate Amsden containers are the future
@Nate Amsden - If you are using Ubuntu 12.04 that is well behind the current state of the art in Linux containers. 14.04 might address some of your technical issues. The reason that so much is happening with containers now rather than a couple of years ago is because of the major new kernel features which have been added to support containers better.
I'll also add that although it may not be popular to say this, SystemD has had features added to it to provide better support for containers. I think you would have to go to the very latest (non-LTS) version of Ubuntu to get that though. (Not that I'm suggesting you ought to do that).
It's early days for containers. I wouldn't necessarily rush out this minute and replace existing applications with containerized ones unless I had a specific need (as you did). I would however definitely be spending time learning about them and tinkering with them because they will be a big deal in the next couple of years.
"hopefully management types don't get confused and think they need containers to deploy micro services, when micro services deploy just fine in VMs."
Well, the big cloud providers are deploying containers inside VMs. The two are sometimes complementary rather than competing.
Different people are doing different things with containers, but the popular concept now is that we should be building complex applications by plugging pre-made containers together like building blocks rather than hand crafting everything from scratch. It's not the solution to everything, but it does simplify deployment for a lot of common cases.
By the way, congratulations on finding a creative solution to your problem. It's good to read about your experience in detail. A lot of people like to sit back and complain, while only a few go out and find solutions.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
