Dokku: A small PaaS implementation

http://progrium.com/blog/2013/06/19/dokku-the-smallest-paas-implementation-youve-ever-seen/

by progrium • 13 years ago

210 38 13 years ago

druiid5• 13 years ago

Saw this a while back. It looks like a fun little project for Docker. What I'd be more interested in is seeing a more robust version of something like this (and the author mentions it on his Github). Things like scaling ability and similar would be cool. It certainly would move it from the realm of 'smallest PaaS', but for my uses at least it's not very useful without being able to do any sort of multi-tenancy/multi-host type stuff.

If anyone is aware of a Docker project being worked on like that. I'd be very interested in seeing it as well.

progrium11• 13 years ago

I was talking to somebody in the Docker IRC channel that was using some of the same Dokku components to build a more distributed version of Dokku. Not sure if it's released yet.

Part of the goal of Dokku is to define some components that would work just as well in a distributed fashion if the components were distributed. By deferring that complexity, I can focus on making something simple and modular that should be easier to do as a distributed system later.

My involvement in Docker in the early stages was with this same thought in mind. Docker was designed to be a component to build things like a PaaS, as well as many other things. Much like the other components of Dokku. The end result is a loosely defined "toolkit" that you can build your own variation of a PaaS with whatever requirements you might have.

shykes6• 13 years ago

There are several ongoing projects to orchestrate deployment to a cluster of multiple docker hosts. Docker is designed to be easily dropped into a distributed system, which helps.

For example, there is an Openstack integration [1], Hipache and Nginx integration for load balancing [2] [3], and I know several people are exploring integration with Apache Mesos and Zookeeper. There's also a Velociraptor/Docker integration [4].

Lastly, I've seen a lot of ops teams plug docker into their own deployment tools, but those are generally not open-source.

Feel free to drop by the IRC channel (#docker@freenode) to chat some more!

[1] http://github.com/dotcloud/openstack-docker [2] http://index.docker.io/u/samalba/hipache [3] http://github.com/dotcloud/hipache [4] https://bitbucket.org/yougov/velociraptor

shykes6• 13 years ago

There's also Gaffer by Benoit Chesneau [1], a distributed process manager which is being integrated into Docker.

[1] https://github.com/benoitc/gaffer

druiid5• 13 years ago

I did see the openstack Docker integration and it seems like a very interesting prospect. Hopefully something that will be integrated into the core Openstack project (although perhaps it might be better to integrate LXC into Openstack and then feed Docker through that).

The one thing I haven't seen any real solution for is the scaling/autoscaling portion of the equation. I think if that can be solved for, the rest would just be window-dressing on top of the Docker core.

bjt• 13 years ago

Velociraptor author here. We don't yet integrate with Docker, though would like to once there's some kind of standalone mode (see https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/503 and https://bitbucket.org/yougov/velociraptor/issue/14/investiga...).

Velociraptor does use LXC containers though, and provide the same kind of buildpack support as Dokku, plus a nice dashboard with streaming updates on your processes and some help for managing all the config for your instances (if 2 apps use the same database, you only have to record its URL in one place).

We're running dozens of apps and hundreds of instances on Velociraptor at YouGov, but it still has plenty of rough edges.

opdemand• 13 years ago

OpDemand is working on exactly what you're describing. Heroku-style private PaaS with emphasis on control over instances, routing layer, hosting providers, etc. Current version has full scaling support (instances, processes & nginx proxies). It's based on Docker, Heroku buildpacks all glued together via Chef server. It'll be released under Apache license. More to come...

druiid5• 13 years ago

I've seen your guys site before actually. I thought you were a Puppet house, not Chef though?

Sounds interesting to be sure though! I'll keep an eye on your site.

sciurus2• 13 years ago

If you want your own PaaS that scales, take look at Red Hat's OpenShift.

https://www.openshift.com/open-source

progrium11• 13 years ago

Or CloudFoundry.

druiid5• 13 years ago

Openshift per the #openshift channel only currently supports scaling of HTTP resources (I'm a bit surprised about that).

I currently use Cloudify, but have had some... issues and they use a Java agent which is pretty memory heavy, so I'm working on alternatives. Cloud Foundry is about the only other viable option I've found so far.

swanson• 13 years ago

What are the next steps to take for pushing an app with a database, Redis/Memcache, and scheduled jobs?

Do I just set that stuff up like normal on my box or should I be integrating that with Docker?

Very cool project, would love to get this working and used for internal projects.

shykes6• 13 years ago

That's my favorite aspect of the Dokku/Docker combo: your paas doesn't need to be in a walled garden, isolated from the rest of your stack. You can mix containers deployed by Dokku with other containers deployed directly on Docker - in the end they're all docker containers, so you can manage them with the same tools.

progrium11• 13 years ago

Yeah, what Solomon said. For the moment, Dokku is focusing on the same sort of stateless apps Heroku supports and considers running databases a separate concern. For now you can run your databases, etc on the same host, in Docker containers, somewhere else, just out of band from Dokku.

But I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Dokku could better support datastores.

shykes6• 13 years ago

I think it would be really cool to have Dokku "add-ons" which behind the scenes map to the docker containers of your choice :)

thelarry2• 13 years ago

Isn't running a database in a container sort of bad practice? Especially if it does a lot of io

fcoury• 13 years ago

This is a great project. I am currently trying to help progrium to fix a bug that is keeping the Python buildpack to work. So if you want to help, here's the GH issue:

https://github.com/progrium/dokku/issues/13

Also, be welcome to drop by at #dokku @freenode.

progrium11• 13 years ago

Yeah, seems party is moving to freenode...

kposehn• 13 years ago

Very cool. We'll probably test this out very soon and could easily make our massive deploy sets easier to deal with.

progrium11• 13 years ago

Oh by the way, it's pronounced doh-koo. For the record. :D

lmm• 13 years ago

Trying to persuade people to pronounce something the way you as creator do is a losing battle if it doesn't read like that - see GIF.

(fwiw my first thought was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVdtQfqS9_U )

progrium11• 13 years ago

I had this argument last night. Ultimately I probably won't care if people say it wrong relative to author intention. Some people will know, others won't. I just want to at least document the intended pronunciation, which is the way the actual word is said in Japanese. Which, btw, means "dock" ... the closest I could get to Docker and just happens to sound like Heroku.

andyhmltn2• 13 years ago

Awesome! I've wanted something like this for a while. About 2 weeks ago, I tried running this and it took upwards of half an hour to get running on my VPS with DigitalOcean.

Today however it took 30 seconds so I'm not sure whether it has been updated but a great improvement :-) The only thing I can't wrap my head around in the README is the 'deploy an app' section.

It says to cd into node-js-sample. Where does that folder come from? I created a bare repo called 'node-js-sample' in /home/git and I tried pushing to that but I get this error:

/usr/local/bin/gitreceive: line 54: /home/git/node-js-test/hooks/pre-receive: Permission denied

I looked and that hook doesn't exist (that'd be why! Haha) What's the proper way of creating an app ready to be deployed on the server?

andyhmltn2• 13 years ago

Woops! Looks like I was overcomplicating things. You don't actually need to create anything on the server at all. That's pretty sweet

porker• 13 years ago

Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5852911

Dokku: A small PaaS implementation

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