I would like to deploy a rails API app to AWS Elastic Beanstalk and noticed that there are two options for docker.
Single container
Multi-container
I think it is enough with a single container for this app however, I was wondering when is the case to use multi-container. If I would like to deploy two rails apps(one is an API app and the other is an admin app) to a single EC2 instance then is this the case?
Well.. Not really. Multicontainer, as it stays, has more than a one container within overall definition (done with Dockerrun.aws.json file). You can still deploy just one container with whatever application you want, let's say django, Python based framework, where there's an API and admin panel as well and it all sits within one application.
But you may want to deploy your application behind some reverse proxy, it might be Nignx let's say, so there's a need for a second container. That's the case where you would use Multicontainer. The main advantage of using Multicontainer is that each container can talk to each other using local network and some DNS host mapping, so your Nginx container can invoke with proxy_pass any application by its name, like just "backend", where Rails or Django application is living.
Related
I’ve spent months building an application and now I’m looking to deploy it, but I’m new to Docker and I seem to have brain block when it comes to actually containerizing my application. I need to run the following technologies:
php 7.2
mysql 5.7
apache 2.4
phpMyAdmin 4.7
My application will need to be available exclusively through https and I’m assuming the connection between my application and the mysql container will also need to be through a secure port.
In addition to that I have a wordpress site that will serve as the pre-login experience for my application that I’d like to dockerize, but should not share the same DB. When I move this to a prod environment, I will not include the phpMyAdmin container.
How many containers do I need? I was thinking that I would need at least 5:
apache
php
mysql (my application)
mysql (wordpress)
phpmyAdmin
Should my application and the worpress site live in the php container? or should I create separate containers for each.
What should my docker-compose.yml file and dockerfiles look like to achieve this feat?
The driving idea here is that a container should contain a single "service". You don't break things into containers by software component (php, apache, etc.) but rather by whatever needs to be combined to create a single service. So if your application is a PHP application hosted by Apache, then you'd want a container for your application that contained PHP, Apache and your application code. That would provide your application as a service.
Same goes for Wordpress. If Wordpress is running behind Apache and needs PHP, you'd create a second container containing PHP, Apache, WordPress, and your WordPress content, producing your "Wordpress service".
Each of your individual databases can be seen as a service, so you might want two containers running MySQL, one serving each of your databases. You could choose to consider the database server as a whole to be a service, and have it serve both of your databases. Then you could get away with a single MySQL container. Which way you go with this is a minor issue. Having a single database server will likely save a little bit of resources by avoiding some duplication.
If all of your services need to talk to each other, the easiest way to do this with Docker is to use Docker Compose. This lets you create multiple containers that know about each other and can communicate very easily between each other by way of some simple DNS logic that Docker Compose provides. With Compose, you give each of your containers a simple name, and then that name can be looked up via DNS to provide the IP address of each container. So for example, if your MySql container was named "mysql", your app container could connect to it via the DNS address "mysql" with no additional work on your part.
With respect to java Microservices deployment since we use same kind of configurations to all the apps(micro services) does it make any difference using dockers, rather than deploying on multiple ports?Because at the end apps will be down if VM is down.
Docker is brilliantly suitable for microservice application deployment. You put each service into separate container and use docker-compose (docker-swarm, k8n or whatever) to launch your containers and link them into one isolated network (done automatically).
In such configuration you dont use port, but use hostnames. That means each container will have its own name inside network, and all requests are being done using that name. That is much more convenient comparing to use of different tcp ports.
Putting applications inside containers are becoming the defacto standard for deployment. Docker helps in creating container images which can be used to deploy inside your cluster like kubernetes cluster.
I have multiple web apps, all of them running on Apache, many of them using PHP, MySQL, node, etc.
I'm not currently using Docker, but I would like to use it, and I would like to know what would be the best architectureto use.
I suppose that in my localhost I should create a container with Apache, and all the applications would be using it (am I wrong?). The same with MySQL if the application uses it.
But then, what happens when I want to deploy my projects (or some of them) into a production environment? I'm currently using Microsoft Azure WebApps, and I don't thing that my 'localhost' setup will be valid. I suppose that in production, each project should have its own Apache, but this changes my Docker setup, and I don't think this is the Docker philosophy.
So, how should I structure my architecture?
I would like to run several instances of a multi-container application at the same time using the same compose file. One of the containers in the application accepts websockets on a certain port.
I have an nginx proxy to forward different domains or locations to different instances of the application. The instances are actually different tenants using the application.
I would like to simply be able to run:
docker stack deploy -c docker-stack.yml tenant1
docker stack deploy -c docker-stack.yml tenant2
And somehow get different ports to the apps, which I then can use in the proxy to forward different websocket connections to different application instances, either using locations or virtual hosts.
So either:
ws://tenant1.mydomain.com
or
ws://mydomain.com/tenant1
How to configure the proxy to do this can surely be figured out. I've started to read a bit about: https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy, which seems nice. However it requires that I set the virtual host name as environment variable for each app-instance and I can't seem to find a way to pass arguments with my docker stack deploy command?
Ideally I would like to not care about exact ports, they would rather be random. But they need to somehow be known to the nginx proxy to be able to forward. I want to easily be able to spin up a new appinstance (tenant) stack and just set up the proxy for that name (or even better if the proxy can handle that automatically with the naming of the app).
Bonus if both examples above works (both virtual host and location) since that would make it possible to test and develop without making subdomains / new domains.
Suggestions?
I’m using Amazon ECS to auto deploy my containers on uat/production.
What is the best way to do that?
I have a REST api with a several front-end clients
Should I package my api container with nginx in the same container?
And do the same thing with the others front end clients.
Or I have to write a big task definition to bring together all my containers(db, nginx, php, api, clients) :(, but that's mean that I should redeploy all my infrastructure at each push uat/prod
I'm very confusing.
I would avoid including too much in a single container. Try and distill your containers down to one process doing one thing. If all you're doing is serving up a REST API for consumption by your front end, just put the essential pieces in for that and no more.
In my experience you also want your ECS tasks to be able to handle failure gracefully and restart, and the more complicated your containers are the harder this is to get right.
Depending on your requirements I would look into using ELB instead of nginx, you can have your ECS cluster point at an ELB and not have to deal with that piece at all.
Do not use ECS - it's too crude. I was using it as a platform for our staging/production environments and had odd problems during deployments - sometimes it worked well, sometimes - not (with the same Docker images). ECS provides not clear model of container deployment and maintenance.
There is another good, stable and predictive option - Docker Cloud service. It's new tool (a.k.a. Tutum) that was acquired by Docker. I switched the CI/CD to use it and we're happy with it.
Bind Amazon user credentials to Docker Cloud account. Docker Cloud uses AWS (or other provider) API for creating appropriate computer instances.
Create Node. Select Amazon EC2 instance type and parameters of storage, security group and so on. New instance will contain installed docker software and managing container that handles messages from Docker Cloud (deploy, destroy and others).
Create Stackfile, see https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/apps/stack-yaml-reference/. Stackfile is a definition of container group you required. You can define different scaling/distribution models for your containers using specific Stackfile options like deployment strategy, see https://docs.docker.com/docker-cloud/apps/stack-yaml-reference/#deployment-strategy-1.
Define ELB configurations in AWS for your new instances.
P.S. I'm not a member of Docker team and I like other AWS services :).
Here is my two cents on the topic, the question is not really related to ecs, it applies to any body deploying their apps on docker.
I would suggest separating the containers, one for nginx and one for API.
if they need to be co-located on the same instance, on ECS you can define them as part of the same task and on kubernetes you can make them part of same pod.
Define a docker link between the nginx and the api container. This will allow the nginx process to talk to api container without the api container exposing its ports to the host.
One advantage of using the container running platforms such as kubernetes and ecs is that they ensure each of the container run all the time and dynamically restart if one of the processes/containers go down.
Separating the containers will allow these platforms to monitor both the processes separately. When you combine the two into one container the docker container can only run with one of the processes in foreground, so you will loose the advantage of auto-healing for one of the processes.
Also moving from nginx to ELB is not a straightforward solution, you may have redirections and other things configured on the nginx, which are not available on ELB(As of date).
If you also need the ELB, there is no harm in forwarding the requests from the ELB to the nginx port.