[doublerebel]

Thanks, I remember seeing the autopilot pattern mentioned on Joyent's blog, but haven't seen that website. The lifecycle [0] looks remarkably similar to the build and deployment steps outlined in Distelli's manifest [1]. I use Distelli+Consul on Joyent so I suppose I've been doing the autopilot pattern without realizing it!

I know that much of Distelli's workflow comes from the founders' experience at AWS, so I wonder where the root of this pattern lies. Perhaps that would help unify these similar methods.

[0]: http://autopilotpattern.io/#how-do-we-do-it

[1]: https://www.distelli.com/docs/manifest/deployment-types

[0x74696d]

I'm the lead developer for Joyent of ContainerPilot, which is the tool at the core of our Autopilot Pattern implementation examples. The lifecycle events you recognize in Distelli are definitely similar. And Chef's new tool Habitat has a supervisor that was independently developed but ended up having interesting parallels with ContainerPilot. So there's a universal idea lurking under there, which is why we called Autopilot a "Pattern" rather than a tool in itself.

But it's not clear to me from a casual glance at the the docs whether Distelli lives inside the container during those hooks? That's part of the distinction of the Autopilot Pattern is making the higher-level orchestration layer as thin as possible.

(As far as the root, some of it is derived from my experiences as a perhaps-foolishly-early adopter of Docker in prod at my previous gig at a streaming media startup. The rest is derived from both principals with which Joyent's own Triton infra is built and our experiences speaking with enterprise devs and ops teams.)

[kt9]

I'm the founder at Distelli and I just want to clarify that the Distelli agent doesn't typically live inside the container though it can. Its used to orchestrate the container lifecycle on the VM itself.

However if you're building Docker containers and deploying them we recommend using Kubernetes which is something that Distelli supports out of the box now - https://www.distelli.com

[doublerebel]

Thanks for sharing those details, great to have more insight into the process.

In my case the Distelli agent does live inside the "container", because I'm using SmartOS instances and not Docker containers. It handles deployment, and monitors processes of the apps when I'm not using an SMF.

I'm not sure how Distelli's K8s orchestration works, that functionality is more recent. In my case, the lifecycle details are in the manifest in the app repo, which is just a YAML where each lifecycle section is a bash script. App builds are just tarballs in S3. So there's not much to the deployment process.