[takeda]

Great, but what are the benefits of running Docker in AWS? You are still running VMs and you are being charged for running them. With Docker you are simply putting yet another layer of complexity, because now you have to run more beefier VMs, you now have problem with network communication between containers running on different hosts. So you will most likely need to use overlay network. You also decrease resiliency, because now when AWS terminated a single VM, all apps running on that node suddenly disappear.

I also don't get the argument about running the same container in dev/test/prod. For example my company is working on going Docker and one of the problem with these environments is that app running there has different configuration. So the idea to solve it is to create three different versions of the same container. Genius! But now are you really running the same thing in dev/test/prod? How is it different to what we did in the past? Especially that before Docker through our continuous delivery we actually were using exact same artifact on machines set up with chef that were configured the same way as in prod, while with Docker now we plan to use three different containers.

[osipov]

>what are the benefits of running Docker in AWS?

I don't see benefits to running Docker in AWS. In my opinion, AWS implemented its Docker-based Container Service very poorly. I advise my customers against using AWS when want to use Docker. There are many bare metal as a service providers out in the marketplace.

>the argument about running the same container in dev/test/prod

Is this issue really caused by Docker because you said that you had consistent environments when built by chef?

[nnain]

I installed the Amazon Linux Installation Image (AMI) with docker and Python 3.4 for a recent project. I know ElasticBeanstalk fairly well, but configuring this was a big headache. WASTED LOT OF TIME.

Instead of making life easy, it just added unnecessary burden of learning Docker for the future project members. Documentation is poor, had to hunt for hours for solutions to simple queries.

On AWS, I would suggest you stick with the basic Linux flavour that you know. Use their Docker build only IF you know docker very well.

[pavel_lishin]

> In my opinion, AWS implemented its Docker-based Container Service very poorly.

We looked into using it earlier this year.

The web UI was flat-out busted in several ways - they only listed the first 100 security groups, and we have a magnitude more than that. The command line interface was poorly documented, and was missing some of the functionality.

It was a total waste of a week; I wonder if they've fixed any of that.

[vosper]

Would you mind elaborating on some of the issues you see with Elastic Container Service? I'd hoped it would be something like an AWS-specific Mesos, but I haven't looked into it closely.

[notwedtm]

Can you name a few bare metal as a service providers?

[nickstinemates]

Rackspace, SoftLayer/Bluemix

[spdustin]

Your environment-specific config shouldn't be in the container, but described in the environment itself, whether through ENV vars exposed to the container, or a mounted volume of config files. This is a solved problem, in my (admittedly limited, compared to some other commenters) experience.

[bri3d]

Robust composition. Instead of needing a separate database, message queue, app server VM, you can run all 3 containers together on one omnibus machine, or separated as scalability needs demand.

Yes, you can achieve something similar using multiple layers in OpsWorks or different deployment schemes with normal Chef, but IMO containers make provisioning and deploying combinations of components easier than most other provisioning and deployment solutions. There's less opportunity for unexpected version collisions and because the network infrastructure is virtual, you can move containers between underlying VMs, allowing capacity planning without substantial reconfiguration.

[nogox]

Check out https://medium.com/@hyperhq/docker-hyper-and-the-end-of-gues...

I think this is the way Container-as-a-Service to go, instead of the current form of AWS ECS.

[stevelandiss]

@takeda, how do you create 3 different containers in Docker for dev/test/prod? What parameters are you changing in the three stages?