[maximz]

I may have what you're looking for: I've been working on exactly this problem, because I grew tired of the headaches from maintaining a "snowflake server" (http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html), which I configured once in the past and would be very difficult to reproduce.

Here's a super-simple Docker host stack I put together that you can install on a cloud machine fairly easily. It runs Docker containers, does automatic backups, and has monitoring and alerting built-in. I've run around 5 webapps, split between 10 containers, on this infrastructure for about 6 months with significantly fewer headaches. Monitoring alerts go straight into a personal Slack channel.

The implementation is deliberately low-level -- you'll be running bare docker commands -- because the goal is to have a trivial infrastructure and to learn Docker in the process. There's no reliance on the "magic" in big wrappers like Kubernetes. Because there's nothing fancy in here, it's simple to understand and use.

My write-up is rough around the edges right now, but eventually this will turn into a simple blog post with an Ansible playbook attached. Here's a rough draft of how to set it up manually: https://github.com/maximz/docker-host/blob/master/public_doc...

There's an nginx reverse proxy fronting the Docker containers. You can do a zero-downtime deploy pretty easily. Happy to answer any questions if they arise.

[dchuk]

Awesome I will take a look!