Playing with Docker, Vagrant, Dokku for deployment

I’m looking at launching a series of new web services in the future and that got me thinking about finding ways to improve my development and deployment workflow to make it super trivial to launch new services and APIs.

Recent experience with Heroku’s PaaS got me looking in that direction. Pushing a git repository to kick off a server build is an eloquently simple approach that makes spinning up new services a snap.

However Heroku costs can quickly spiral up and out of control. Running it myself on raw Amazon EC2 or a local dev server would be ideal.

Thanks to several new projects it’s possible to create an easy to use mini-heroku on your own server.

Docker is a brilliantly simple idea that has sparked a huge following in the last few months.  It is one of the most exciting developments in Open Source at the moment.  Basically Docker lets you run an extremely lightweight virtual machine on top of Linux.  You can spin up and down services in 1-2 seconds that are isolated from the host server which allows you to play with various server configurations quickly, easily, and without touching the core system.

Docker allows you to specify your entire server configuration in a Dockerfile of which there are already thousands defined and shared and searchable at http://index.docker.io.  Need a WordPress server? Redis? Memcached? you can now get them up and running in a virtualized environment extremely easily.

Dokku, builds on top of Docker with the ability to replicate the most impressive feature of Heroku: git push to deploy.  Once set up you can configure a git push remote and have Dokku automatically build and run a Docker for your app and host it on a subdomain.  Brilliant.

Managing all these Docker services can be done with another awesome tool called shipyard. Bring your virtualized multi-host environment under control.  It even supports automatic restarts of crashed services.

Getting it all up and running has been fairly straight forward. Once in place, it will make managing my own cloud of services much more robust.