Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up application container company

Re:Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up applicatio... by stephengillie on Saturday November 14, 2015 @04:44PM (#10567393)

Something I think a lot of people struggle with, both on the Dev side and the Ops side, is to think of VMs and containers as completely disposable. Does it add value, or help you, for you to have an emotional attachment to this server?

Instead of doing OS updates, application updates, code updates, and configuration updates to 50 identical webservers that live behind load balancers, it might be faster to upgrade one. Then that one can be templated, cloned and deployed and replace the currently operating ones. There's still server name, IP address, and other configuration that has to be automated, and sometimes automating this is harder than automating all that patching, sometimes not.

This obviates server histories. True - you can't say "This VM has always performed better than the others" since you get a new farm of VMs every month. While many see that as a downside, it's actually a benefit that you don't need to think about that data.

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Re:Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up applicatio... by modoc on Saturday November 14, 2015 @04:54PM (#10567431)

Puppet/Chef and general admin automation scripts handle the updates/config changes/etc... very easily without the added complexity of container management/orchestration.

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Re:Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up applicatio... by superuser2 on Saturday November 14, 2015 @09:45PM (#10568274)

Ha! I worked at [major tech company] and our Puppet runs took about 3 hours. Developing manifests was surreal - punch card era code/compile/test cycles. The worst and most frequent production outages were seemingly innocuous Puppet changes that made it through code review. Our puppet manifest was in the 10kloc range, most of them generated.

Containerization is now letting individual teams manage app-specific configuration they actually understand and can test and iterate. A central org maintains the base image and can redeploy our containers with OS-level fixes as necessary. Our "self-service" deployment infrastructure was a behemoth that no one understood, documented by tribal knowledge. At less I can Google how to use the Docker API.

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Re:Ex VMware, Microsoft and Citrix workers set up applicatio... by eropple on Saturday November 14, 2015 @10:30PM (#10568371)

If your Puppet runs take three hours and range into the thousands of lines, that's a disastrously poorly built Puppet environment. Blame your people, not your tools.

(And I say this as no fan of Puppet; I'm a Chef user. Where I've never seen anything remotely that deranged, even in dysfunctional environments.)

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