
Show HN: Kontena – Docker Platform Written in Ruby - nevalau
http://www.kontena.io
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smilekzs
OT: I find the name funny -- it's basically how you read "container" in
Japanese/Engrish!

[http://jisho.org/word/%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%83%8A](http://jisho.org/word/%E3%82%B3%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%83%8A)

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brobinson
This was my first thought when I saw the name. :) Definitely a loan word.
Japanese has a comically high amount of loan words from English.

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oelmekki
The biggest feature I'm missing in docker-compose is the ability to do zero
downtime deployment (spawning a new container for a service while maintaining
the old one up until the new one is ready would be enough).

Does Kontena allow this?

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nevalau
Yes it does. Additionally if your service has more than 1 instance then
Kontena will replace each instance one-by-one when deploying. You can even
define that Kontena will wait for given port before moving to next instance.

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oelmekki
Oh wow, that's awesome. I'm sold :)

Thanks!

Edit: btw, you should probably advertise this more on the home page, I'm
pretty sure zero downtime is a big no go for many when it comes to docker-
compose, especially rails users used to it with unicorn.

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nevalau
That's true. There are still lot's of hidden features that we should mention
somewhere. We are currently improving our documentation, so hopefully things
are better soon.

And thanks for feedback, it is always appreciated and motivating us to make it
better!

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icpmacdo
Have services like Dokku, Empire(as nohaxplz pointed out) and now Kontena
reached Heroku like convenience? I want to skip the dev ops but 500$ a month
for an server with only 6 gigs of memory seems insane. If any dev here want to
share there experience with any or all of them I would be happy to hear it.

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timdorr
There is a Dokku "application" VM you can one-click install on Digital Ocean.
It's nearly identical to Heroku in terms of convenience and significantly
better in price. For simple projects you might normally relegate to a Hobby
tier or 1-2 dynos in Heroku, I would consider it a perfect fit.

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joshmn
There's also dokku-alt[0], which is "dokku on steroids" (it really is)

[0] [https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt](https://github.com/dokku-
alt/dokku-alt)

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nohaxplz
This looks very interesting, comparable to empire and other heroku-like tools.

The stateful containers in particular seem interesting, and are implemented
with data containers. How does the data in the data container stay persistent
across nodes?

How does this manage service discovery? What about scaling?

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xfiler
Stateful containers do not move automatically across nodes but we are looking
to integrate something like ClusterHQ Flocker (or implement our own using the
new Docker plugin api).

For the service discovery part Kontena has builtin dns server. Each service
will get their own dns name: <service_name>.kontena.local. And within a
service you can point to individual container using
<service_name>-<number>.kontena.local. Latest version (0.7) also introduced
grid wide etcd so your application can also use that for custom service
discovery.

Scaling is handled so that you can easily join new nodes to grid. Services
support scaling so you basically just have to define how many service
instances you want and Kontena scheduler will deploy instances (containers)
across nodes.

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sergiotapia
Does this replace Ansible or Docker or Chef?

I'm not sure what this is used for, but it looks really interesting!
Appreciate the additional information.

~~~
nevalau
Kontena does not replace Docker. It's a management and orchestration layer on
the top of Docker. With Kontena you can manage and deploy your Docker
applications.

Kontena applications can be described in YAML file (kontena.yml). Kontena.yml
extends docker-compose.yml format by introducing some new attributes only
supported in Kontena, for example scale of a service and deploy specific
attributes.

A Service definition describes the container image, networking, scaling and
stateful/stateless attributes for your application. Services may be linked
together to create desired architecture. Each service is automatically
assigned with internal DNS address that can be used inside your application
for inter-Service communications.

The summary of Kontena key features:

* Scheduler with affinity filtering

* Built-in private Docker image registry

* Remote VPN access for workload services

* Virtual Networking Built-In

* Ready made load-balancing service

* Log and statistics aggregation with streaming

* Access control and roles for Kontena users

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olalonde
A comparison to Deis or docker-compose would have been nice.

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nevalau
I agree, some comparison is definitely needed. We will put some comparison not
only to Deis and docker-compose but to other related services too to our
website as soon as possible.

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andyl
How does this compare to Docker's fig-based orchestration solution??

