[ale] [barely OT] Containerization

DJ-Pfulio djpfulio at jdpfu.com
Sat Oct 21 06:03:51 EDT 2017


Think services for a container.  MongoDB is good.  MongoDB with any GUI tool
inside the container is bad.

Have you looked at vagrant for virtualbox automation?

Or just have a development server farm that devs remote into for GUI work.
Deployed that for a very large customer years ago.

I looked up RStudio - it can be controlled by a web browser interface.  I'd use
that. "in a browser connected to RStudio Server"
  https://www.rstudio.com/products/RStudio/#Server

On 10/20/2017 04:27 PM, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> OK, everyone -
> 
> I've seen a lot of talk about Docker go by. I am needing to look at engineering
> some "distributed modular containerization" of apps and perhaps whole OS
> instances. I just had a situation develop on the job where a MongoDB instance
> needed to be available for casual use (i.e., for education purposes) on Windows
> laptops. I was able to generate a tiny Linux VM to do that; set up for use in
> VirtualBox using a host-only adapter, the instance was nice and contained (by
> default MongoDB goes in with no authentication set up at all - it's just
> *there*). But trafficking in whole VMs seems like a lot of weight to throw
> around, even though I managed to get this particular VM's export file down to 1
> gig, There are also lots of guardrails to smack into, like the limited size of
> the virtual disk, and other things like making sure the "guest addition" daemon
> that makes sure the clock stays synced and so forth that I would just as soon
> not have to deal with.
> 
> What I envision is something where MongoDB lives in one container and, say,
> another container with RStudio with all the needed packages, extensions, etc.
> and yet another with such-and-such Python version and all its intended packages
> preloaded can be flown into a relatively unmodified OS instance (assume Windows
> or OS X) and networked together so that the apps in the containers can see each
> other; perhaps just one needs to be able to reach out to the host machine's
> network or possibly other machines on the host machine's network needs to able
> to see one or more of the containers. Is Docker a fit for what I'm thinking of,
> or would something else be, or do I need to modify my thinking?
> 
> - Jeff
> 
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