DrupalCon Baltimore 2017: Captaining a container ship: Docker orchestration with Kontena
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2017-04-26

In this talk, I’m going to introduce Kontena, an orchestration tool that lets you level up from plain Docker without spending days reading and banging your head on the desk.

Docker containers turned out to be a great tool for spinning up applications in development, testing or even production environments. Using the same deployment mechanism in dev as in ops makes life easier for everyone and significantly shortens cycle times. But as soon as the number of containers rises (and it always does because Docker is fun), things seem to get complicated. This is the point where others suggest studying for a web operations degree (by recommending  Ansible, Chef, Swarm, Rancher, Kubernetes or even Mesosphere). Welcome to Yak Shaving 101...

Or you could use a nice little Docker orchestration platform from Finland. It's called Kontena and it's as easy to set up as it is getting an application stack running on it. If you’re already familiar with Docker Compose, you’ll need only a few minutes to get a full application stack running. (Later, you can still use Kontena to build a distributed infrastructure across multiple cloud providers.)

At freistilbox, we tried Kontena in our internship programme and promptly put it to use in our Drupal hosting infrastructure. In my talk, I'm going to cover topics like:

Why choose Kontena?
The Kontena architecture
Setting up a Kontena cluster for development or production
Upgrading from Docker Compose
Deploying a multi-container application stack
Network and security
I'm still amazed how simple it is to use Kontena, and this talk will be easy to understand even by developers and sysadmins unfamiliar with Docker.