Editor’s Note: As of January 2022, iland is now 11:11 Systems, a managed infrastructure solutions provider at the forefront of cloud, connectivity, and security. As a legacy iland.com blog post, this article likely contains information that is no longer relevant. For the most up-to-date product information and resources, or if you have further questions, please refer to the 11:11 Systems Success Center or contact us directly.
Containerization of applications using Docker, Rocket, and Pivotal Garden is becoming a popular way of deploying what are known as “Cloud-Native Apps.” This is the new way of deploying applications that scale easily using the cloud while maintaining security.
To enable the easy deployment of container-based apps to VMware-virtualized clouds, such as the 11:11 Cloud, VMware has released an ultra-lightweight Linux runtime called Photon. This provides “just enough operating system” (JeOS) to run containers and supports Docker, Rocket, and Garden out of the box. Photon is less than 400Mb in size, so it deploys really quickly and can run happily with 1vCPU and 384Mb RAM – although this can be increased as needed.
Let us run through an example of how an application can be easily set up to run in the 11:11 Cloud using Docker and Photon.
To test the deployment of Photon on the 11:11 Cloud, the Photon distribution was downloaded from Github as an OVA template and then uploaded to a catalog in the 11:11 Cloud.
Once uploaded to the catalog, a new vApp could be deployed with Photon as a VM within it.
The vApp and its VM were deployed to an Organization Routed network, giving access to the Internet, using DHCP, and choosing 11:11 Systems’ accelerated storage:
After only a minute, the vApp was up and running, and a console was opened to it so that we could interact with it.
First, start and enable Docker from the command line:
As a test, we can use Docker to download and run a WordPress website:
We can use the “docker ps” command to see that WordPress is running on port 80:
From another session, we can open a web browser to the Photon VM’s IP address:
So, in only five minutes, we’ve been able to go from nothing to a running WordPress site running in Docker on a VMware Photon VM.
This example shows how these technologies can greatly streamline the process of migrating container-based apps to the cloud – which will become increasingly important as IT teams focus more and more on developing cloud-native apps.
References:
https://vmware.github.io/photon/
http://kendrickcoleman.com for tips and tricks
