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Mike's monster list of docker tips

Mike Simons on May 14, 2017

I had intended to turn this list in to some kind of monster article or split it in to several. I suck at getting around to writing things so rather...
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Christopher Warner

Good list, I disagree with the Ansible commentary, primarily in regards to a comparison to chef and eventual convergence etc. Not only is Ansible much easier to work with in this regard but it doesn't require anything other than ssh, so client failures are a thing of the past. Using ansible-pull one can pull from repos/branches etc and if you are writing your playbooks such that they fail gracefully or rollback using handlers you can be sure that the system is in whatever you state you intended based on behavior.

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Mike Simons

Hi Christopher, thanks for the comment.

Ansible is my tool of choice and it is just as capable (and nicer to use than chef) but my commentary comes from my experience of how these tools tend to be used in the field.

Very few use ansible-pull and of those that do I've seen no one runs it on a schedule like chef-client daemon.

If you're using chef-server & chef-client then you are guaranteed frequent converges.

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Patrick Paechnatz

Very nice list about common and uncommon hints / best practices! I'm humbling about some of the issues you described during my devop time and can really confirm some of your points 😏 .., thank you for sharing this!

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Mike Simons

Thanks Patrick :)

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Christopher McClellan

Tip from one writer to another: Avoid abbreviations. At least, fully define them once, then abbreviate thereafter. I've read the whole post and still no idea what "CM" stands for.

Otherwise, it was a very interesting read. I've not had a need to manage more than a handful of containers, so it was good to hear about tips for managinging lots of them. ++

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Mike Simons

Thanks for the feedback :)
This wasn't written so much as collected from notes hence the general rough rambling presentation that assumes a certain background.

I've updated the post but for reference CM as used here is "Config Managament" (Chef, Puppet, Ansible etc).

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jhmnieuwenhuis

Hi Mike,

Awesome list and good tips !

Regarding CentOS 7 :

I am using the 4.12.4 kernel on CentOS 7.3

I install that version from elrepo.org/linux/kernel/el7/

Works fine for me.

Regards,
Hans

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Ryan Blunden

Awesome list of tips! Thank you for just sharing instead of waiting till they were perfectly organised.

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Mike Simons

Thanks Ryan. I'm not sure how much of it makes sense to anyone else but hopefully enough of it does to be useful :)

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Ben Halpern

This is a monster list, Mike!

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Mike Simons

Yeah... I've been collecting these for a while. :D