This hits home. While everyone is talking containers, we're running simple processes with a Linux user per instance, and I feel no need to add more complexity to our system, except I'm really struggling to automate stuff.
It seems that if you aren't running a full dockerized cluster of services or outsourcing everything to a PaaS, you're left with building all the infrastructure yourself. What did people use before this great new wave?
I think there is a mix of things being bandied about under the "container" banner.
On the one hand it is about getting more bang for your hardware buck.
On the other it is about someone getting so deep into netsec that they have developed gills.
In the bang for bucks category you have a chain of one box pr database etc.
Then noticing that the hardware sits idle most of the time, so virtualization is depolyed to pack more server on a single box to keep it in use.
Then noticing that virtualization comes with a performance overhead, so it gets replaced chroot/containerization to give the impression of unshared box.
In the netsec category it is really about namespace. Limiting the view of the world the processes gets.
This has a superficial similarity to chroot, but can go much much deeper.
And if one go deep enough, every server ends up looking like a digital fort Knox...
Yeah, but none of that actually needs docker and images and such. If you want to take advantage of the whole server, you can simply run more regular processes on it, and you can launch them on different namespaces using systemd or other process manager. You don't need the whole workflow that comes with these new tools.
Yeah, we're using configuration management, but that still seems too low level. I haven't tried CFEngine, but in the ones I have, there's no concept of an instance (essentially some configuration files and a few databases) that you should be able to treat as a single unit (e.g. delete instance or move it to another server).
I wonder what's the architecture behind WPEngine and similar services. It must provide some isolation since clients can install their own plugins, but on the other hand I don't see them creating a new Docker image for each client, especially since they're self-managed.
It seems that if you aren't running a full dockerized cluster of services or outsourcing everything to a PaaS, you're left with building all the infrastructure yourself. What did people use before this great new wave?