Deployment. We have a legacy application that would take about a day of configuration to deploy properly. With Docker (and some microservices goodness) we've reduced the deploy down to an hour, and are continually improving it.
Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
21–30 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#22One thing I'd like to point out are OS upgrades, security patches or generally package updates. With docker I just rebuild a new image using the latest ubuntu image (they are updated very frequently), deploy the app, test and then push the new image to production. Upgrading the host OS also is much less of a problem because far fewer packages are installed (i.e. it's just docker and the base install).
But then you have many more docker images for different kinds of services that you all have to rebuild, no? Or do you just have one docker image? And out of curiosity: is your testing of new images automated?
We have many images, and we build them in a CI setup using jenkins. I used to run jenkins inside docker and build images within that docker, but this turned out to be a problem. (Mainly more and more resources were used up until the disk was full.) Now it's just jenkins installed on the host building images, starting them and run integration tests.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#23One thing I'd like to point out are OS upgrades, security patches or generally package updates. With docker I just rebuild a new image using the latest ubuntu image (they are updated very frequently), deploy the app, test and then push the new image to production. Upgrading the host OS also is much less of a problem because far fewer packages are installed (i.e. it's just docker and the base install).
This still doesn't say what you are doing. You update the base image, which is presumably something every Docker user does, then you "deploy the app". What are you deploying? How much heavy lifting is your dockerfile doing? How much of the environment do you have to setup manually? How do you supply the app its static and dynamic data? How do you make the app accessible to users? How are you handling availability if…
I'm not sure why I need to tell you all this. :) I was replying to "What are some problems that get solved better when using Docker?".
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#24We've been using Docker for YippieMove (www.yippiemove.com) for a few months now, and it works great.
Getting your hand around the Docker philosophy is the biggest hurdle IMHO, but once you're there it is a delight to work with. The tl;dr is to not think of Docker as VMs, but rather fancy `chroots`.
In any case, to answer your question, for us it significantly decreased deployment time and complexity. We used to run our VMs and provision them with Puppet (it's a Django/Python app), however it took a fair amount of time to provision a new box. More so, there were frequently issues with dependencies (such as `pip install` failing).
With Docker, we can more or less just issue a `docker pull my/image` and be up and running (plus some basic provisioning of course that we use Ansible for).
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#25We use it for everything.
We use the Google Compute Engine container optimised VMs, which make deployment a breeze. Most of our docker containers are static, apart from our application containers (Node.js) that are automatically built from github commits. Declaring the processes that should run on a node via a manifest makes things really easy; servers hold no state, so they can be replaced fresh with every new deployment and it's impossible to end up with manual configuration, which means that there is never a risk of losing some critical server and not being able to replicate the environment.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#26At Shopify, we have moved to Docker for deploying our main product. Primary advantages for us are faster deploys, because we can do part of the old deploy process as part of the container build. Secondly: easier scalability, because we can add additional containers to have more app servers or job workers. More info at http://www.shopify.com/technology/15563928-building-an-inter...
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#27One of the main things I'm using it for are reproducible development environments for a rather complex project comprising nearly ten web services.
We have a script that builds a few different docker images that the devs can then pull down and get using straight away. This is also done through a dev repo that they clone that provides scripts to perform dev tasks across all services (set up databases, run test servers, pull code, run pip etc.).
It used to take a day to set up a new dev enviroment, now it takes around 30 mins and can be done with almost no input from the user and boils down to: install docker, fetch databases restores, clone the dev repo, run the dev wrapper script
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#28At UltimateFanLive we use docker on Elastic Beanstalk to speed up the scaling process. Our load goes from 0 to 60 in minutes, as we are connected with live sports data. Packages like numpy and lxml take way too long to install with yum and pip alone. So we pre-build images with the dependencies but we are still using the rest of the goodies on Elastic Beanstalk. Deploy times have plummeted and we keep t2 cpu credits.
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#29We use Docker to set up our testing environments with Jenkins and install the application in it. Every build will be installed in a Docker Container automatically. The Container is used for acceptance tests. The Docker Containers are set up automatically with a Dockerfile. Its an awesome tool for automatating and deployment and used to implement the concepts of "Continuous Delivery".
Re: Ask HN: How do you use Docker in production?
#30One of the main things I'm using it for are reproducible development environments for a rather complex project comprising nearly ten web services. We have a script that builds a few different docker images that the devs can then pull down and get using straight away. This is also done through a dev repo that they clone that provides scripts to perform dev tasks across all services (set up databases, run test servers,…
This is approximately what I'm using it for too. I'm working on my MSc, and I'm using it to make reproducible experimental environments. Packages locked to specific versions, all required libraries installed, isolated from the rest of the system. Working pretty well in that capacity!