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Raphael Habereder
Raphael Habereder

Posted on • Updated on

I work with Containers, Automation and Cloud Stacks for up to 10 years now, ask me anything

While I continue to work on about 5 posts in parallel, I thought this would be fun to do.

While it normally only works with celebrities, in the worst case noone answers and I can shamefully delete this post. Then I'd have to wait for the day I become famous for crashing some thought-to-be-indestructible software by pure accident.

I am by no means an Expert in these fields (they are huuuuge), but I have been around the block a while. I'm the Kid noone talks to, because I take the whole automation thing too far and put anything that sounds fun into containers to deploy it on azure or my k8s clusters somewhere.

So if you got fun questions, or need something containerized/automated feel free to hammer away at your keyboard, I take requests/challenges :)

Top comments (6)

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renanzulian profile image
Renan Zulian

Ok let's try an reverse engineering πŸ˜‚

Which applications you wouldn't recommend to use containers?

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habereder profile image
Raphael Habereder • Edited

That's a great one!

There are a few things that aren't fun when using containers.

Huge Images, old WebLogics for example. It's not really fun to download an 8GB+ Image. If you scale it on a PaaS, you can probably say bye bye to your disk space :D
We had a lot of fun when we found out that a single developer filled our SSD-SAN with an innocent looking scale-command.

Another amusing thing was a javafx desktop-app, someone thought "would be a great idea to deploy".
You can actually do that with SSH and X11 forwarding, or something like VNC. But the simplest one that we figured out was to share the X11 socket with the container and use it directly.
That was an absolute nightmare, so I would probably say "if it needs a graphics subsystem, don't"

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loujaybee profile image
Lou (πŸš€ Open Up The Cloud ☁️) • Edited

Do you think serverless and containers will eventually converge?

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habereder profile image
Raphael Habereder

To be honest, that depends on your view of the two paradigms.

I don't really see serverless too often in practice, so this is all based on little experience with it.
As I understand it, Serverless means the cloud provider runs the server/runtime, and dynamically manages the allocation of resources.
Serverless applications are broken up into functions, and hosted by a service that typically charges the developer only based on the amount of time each function runs.

That already sounds oddly familiar, don't you think?
In a sense, a CaaS/PaaS Microservice Architecture IMO can already be seen as a type of extended Serverless (with additional control over the runtime layer of containers), just going by the definition. They slot right in there. They host your container-platform, you instead push code in the prepackaged format of microservice containers.

As for reality, which all too often likes to distance itself from theory, I think a merge of the two paradigms won't happen anytime soon.
Containers still require a lot of control over the runtime, which you simply don't need with the serverless approach. Fine-Tuning resource limits and requests, as well as optimizing the basic system of images is probably all unnecessary for serverless users.

But what I can see is, that a lot of serverless platforms can probably be run on some kind of container infrastructure. So it's more of a symbiosis I see, rather than convergence.

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sitharthan profile image
Sitharthan C

How can I start the open stack swift and watchdog for client and remote synchronization?

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Raphael Habereder • Edited

Damn, you got me. OpenStack is one of the few toolsets I haven't given much attention lately.

For a semi-qualified reply, I think I need more information. When reading watchdog, the only thing that comes to mind is the libvirt virtual watchdog for guest devices. Which I can't answer "from the hip" with that much information.
Can you provide more info on your problem and what you want to achieve?
Maybe I can get a better picture and be of more help then :)