
Containership: A simple, distributed container management platform - josegonzalez
https://containership.io/
======
codemac
This webpage has a weird bug where the boxes listing the features are laid out
oddly. I'm on firefox 39.0 w/linux.

[https://i.imgur.com/3Jo3E7g.png](https://i.imgur.com/3Jo3E7g.png)

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normanjoyner
Thanks; we will certainly get this fixed up!

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darylteo
Your feature images are not consistent aspect ratio (particularly the heights)
causing the floats to drop.

Aside: Why are your images 2600 wide anyway? Killing our mobile quotas with
your fancy 4k monitors, yo.

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pbiggar
Interesting business model. It's like Segment.io for containers!

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phildougherty
Thanks!

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molinto
How are you guys different from Mesosphere please?

You have an advantage over them Mesosphere now to as
[https://digitalocean.mesosphere.com/](https://digitalocean.mesosphere.com/)
has been deprecated. Shame as both companies had partnership & put out lots of
press releases about it. Silly as DO just had $83m funding.

~~~
normanjoyner
ContainerShip, the open source software, is different in a few ways.

* Automatic clustering of nodes. Follower nodes should automatically find and cluster with existing nodes.

* Out-of-the-box load balancing via on a port generated when an application is created.

* Built-in service discovery which easily allows you to communicate with other applications running on your cluster.

* Easy extensibility provided through a plugin system. For instance, the open-source web-ui where users can interact with their cluster is simply a plugin on top of the core ContainerShip software.

ContainerShip Cloud offers more compelling differences such as:

* Automatic installation on your favorite cloud provider with a few clicks (constantly adding new providers). As well as the ability to scale your cluster (leader & follower nodes) directly from ContainerShip cloud when additional capacity is needed.

* Point-in-time backups of the entire state of your cluster, including all applications and any persistent data being written to a volume.

* Restoration of backups to the same cluster, or an entirely different ContainerShip cluster you are running on any cloud (or on-prem).

Even more features are currently in the works. I hope this helps.

~~~
molinto
Helpful. Thanks for the feedback :)

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haggy
What do the base hardware requirements look like for this? I ask because we
originally were going to use Deis for container deployment automation but then
found out that they want a minimum of 8GB of ram just to run it (that's before
even running any containers).

~~~
phildougherty
containership has two modes it can run in: leader & follower

You'll need at least one leader host for the cluster to function, and a
minimum of 3 for true high availability.

Follower hosts are where your containers will actually be placed and will run.
The specs on these servers should be great enough to fit all of the
containers/applications you plan to run.

For a small test deployment with under 10 followers, you can get away with
running your leaders on the smallest DigitalOcean droplets without any
problems. Once you get up into larger number of follower hosts the hardware
requirements of the leaders will change, but not significantly.

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electic
Isn't this just another way of lock-in? Now instead of using an open source
solution or some some other open source management platform, you are now
dependent on this company to manage your docker instances. Am I missing
something here?

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conradk
It seems like their technology is open source, or at least some of it:
[https://github.com/containership](https://github.com/containership)

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fortytw2
there's not exactly a lot of code going on in either
[http://github.com/containership/containership](http://github.com/containership/containership)
or
[http://github.com/containership/containership.core](http://github.com/containership/containership.core)

Kinda confusing as to whether or not this exists/works..

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phildougherty
I can assure you that this actually exists and works! :)

"containership" is made up of a handful of other repos.

More details here: [https://docs.containership.io/docs/architectural-
overview](https://docs.containership.io/docs/architectural-overview)

If you're looking for some meat, check out the repos linked from the above
docs page, including:
[https://github.com/containership/legiond](https://github.com/containership/legiond)
[https://github.com/containership/praetor](https://github.com/containership/praetor)

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dalerus
For some reason I thought this would be a shipping container management
platform.

Having said that, I like it. I'll take a look and see if this could solve some
of our problems.

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BinaryIdiot
This is interesting. As someone who doesn't have a whole lot of experience
with most of these container solutions how similar is this to how kubernetes
works?

~~~
phildougherty
There are core ContainerShip features that function similarly to how
Kubernetes does. Both provide a cluster scheduler that places and manages
containers across a group of servers. They ensures jobs are restarted if they
fail, let you scale the number of containers for an app up or down, and make
it so you can stop thinking about individual servers.

That feature set alone is awesome but it won't take you to the finish line,
you'll end up needing to tack other projects on to get a fully working system
when you use something like Kubernetes (and some other popular choices).

With ContainerShip we wanted to make it easy for people to get up and running
without having to learn and glue together many different projects. We are
trying to provide everything needed to run and scale your infrastructure
anywhere in one package.

ContainerShip Cloud makes it easy to stand clusters up on various providers,
backup your data, and easily migrate somewhere else.

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BinaryIdiot
Thanks! I've been meaning to do some testing with kubernetes so I'll make sure
to add this to the list so I can understand it better.

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phildougherty
Co-Founder present if anyone has questions!

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molinto
Few questions please:

1) What OS is installed on the master/slave hosts? 2) When creating new
cluster application, where is the image pulldown powered from? Tried
molinto/nginx but could not select in dropdown. 3) How can we selected private
docker repositories from DockerHub? 4) I have a 'containership/engine' in the
application listings, is this required for things to run?

Thanks

~~~
normanjoyner
When launching a cluster from ContainerShip Cloud, ubuntu is installed. You
can install ContainerShip, the open source software by hand on any linux
distro; we will be supporting more distros from the Cloud interface in the
future.

The pulldown is powered from dockerhub search.

Private docker repositories with authentication are currently in the works.

containership/engine is the default image if one was not provided. It sounds
like there may have been a bug when passing "molinto/nginx". Even if it does
not autocomplete (it doesn't seem to find it using dockerhub search for me)
passing that string in the Create modal should still set it correctly.

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Zaheer
Is it fair to compare this to a self-hosted PAAS (ex. Dokku, Openshift Origin,
etc)?

(just asking for my own understanding)

~~~
phildougherty
Comparing to a self-hosted PaaS is fair for the open source containership
project.

It has built in high availability, automatic clustering of nodes,
loadbalancing, service discovery, persistent data management, internal DNS,
and support for easily extending the core of the system with plugins (plus
more).

Of your examples I would say it is most like Openshift Origin. Dokku being
mainly aimed at people running a single standalone server.

ContainerShip Cloud
([https://cloud.containership.io](https://cloud.containership.io)) is a hosted
service that lets you launch and scale ContainerShip clusters with a click
across multiple providers. You can backup clusters, share them, and move them
between clouds.

I wrote a getting started post that shows step by step how to use
ContainerShip on DigitalOcean that may be of interest:
[https://medium.com/containership-articles/getting-started-
gu...](https://medium.com/containership-articles/getting-started-
guide-b8f1ceb44741)

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jacques_chester
How would you compare to Cloud Foundry? Sounds like a lot of overlap there
too.

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gshx
Is anyone even using CF anymore especially in production? The spring/tomcat
jee based setup seems a bit antiquated when there are so many lighter weight
alternatives available.

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jacques_chester
Cloud Foundry is mostly written in Ruby and Go.

New components are generally written in Go and several Ruby parts are being
progressively replaced by Go parts (especially Diego).

Pivotal (my employers) sold $40 million of PCF in the first year of sales. So
it's got a bit of traction here and there.

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utuxia
That's the first "Pricing" page I've seen that doesn't contain prices.

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gexla
If the menu doesn't have prices, you probably can't afford it.

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drakmail
Does containership has any difference with last.backend?

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phildougherty
I haven't checked out last backend in a while. From a quick look at their site
I can say the following:

\- ContainerShip is open source / Last Backend is not. The "brains" of the
Last Backend system are managed by Last Backend and run on their servers. With
ContainerShip all the critical components run on your own servers so if the
centralized ContainerShip Cloud management system goes down, your systems keep
working.. Not sure the same can be said for LB.

\- ContainerShip already has a fully functional REST API & Command Line
Interface for deploying/scaling/managing apps.

\- ContainerShip Cloud allows you to do point in time snapshots of an entire
cluster which you can then move between clouds/clone/etc.

There is probably more but I would need to dig further into their
documentation.

