
Ask HN: Who is using Docker/rkt containers in production? - _ix
The press is mixed on Docker (and to a lesser extent rkt), especially for use in production environments. Is anyone finding success with Docker or rkt as part of their production deployment?
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djb_hackernews
I work for a well known software company on a SaaS product. We've been using
Docker in production for around 2 and a half years, and started integrating
with docker in earnest close to 3 years ago. We were mostly drawn to the ease
of creating resource isolated processes. We run in AWS on our own brain dead
"orchestration" system but we are looking to use something purpose built soon.

To give a sense of scale we have over 1000 containers running at any given
time and go through ~15k per day since our containers don't live for very
long.

I'm not sure what press is mixed but the industry as a whole has certainly
embraced containers. I'd be suspect of any press that determines containers
are vaporware and not worth the time.

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AlaShiban
We're running significant loads on Azure with Mesos+Docker (Azure Container
Service). Mesosphere's stack removed the Docker runtime and only uses Docker
for image packaging. Stable and in production for over 8 months now.

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tylerpachal
We're running the same setup. How do you find Azure vs AWS/Google?

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AlaShiban
Haven't used AWS/Google yet for the same set up, we've customized the Azure
set up to include tens of TBs of disk space, over 100 compute nodes with quite
a bit of RAM. I'd say for any reasonably sized start up or company, it's a
good choice - plus the Mesosphere stack also helps avoiding lock-in to one
vendor. (would love to see them making multi-cloud tooling)

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contingencies
I don't plan to at my own company, and I certainly wouldn't have done it
anywhere until recently, but am currently setting up docker for CI/CD and
production for a side client whose previous development was a total trainwreck
India outsource jobbie with zero oversight and four years of extreme technical
debt.

I am not sold on docker per-se, but it is a reasonably easy choice for a
container system available to demand foreign developers on arbitrary platforms
standardize on testing with. Containers are auto-generated by the CI/CD
system, based on git commits. We're also using gitlab-ce for this.

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avitzurel
I've been using Docker in production for over a year now.

Multiple iterations on it

1\. Orchestration through chef, no service discovery, Just containers on
machines as micro-services.

2\. Orchestrations through mesos and marathon.

3\. Kubernetes and Rundeck.

#3 has been the best in terms of flexibility, #1 has been the best in terms of
ease of use and fire-and-forget.

The most complicated part about Docker in production is not actually Docker in
production it's everything on the way.

From CI to building to publishing and deployment.

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vr46
I work for an extremely large - £Billions - retail grocery operation in the
U.K. We use Docker containers in production, not right across the business,
but in many important and up-and-coming areas. What did you want to know?

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_ix
I was really looking to take an informal poll to see how common
containerization is in production, but now that you've asked, I guess my
questions revolve around the technology stack:

Are you using kubernetes for orchestration?

Is there automation managing the orchestration configurations like Puppet,
Chef, Ansible, Saltstack?

Can I assume this is being carried out through virtualization, if so, what
kind of hypervisor is in use?

Is this on premise or in the cloud?

More questions to come, I'm sure and thanks in advance for indulging my
curiosity!

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vr46
Yes on Kubernetes - it's not a platform in and of itself, but an excellent
place to found a platform. Automation everywhere. Chef and Ansible, but not on
the same project. It's all AWS-based. We do use ECS on occasion but it's not
great. As others have said, the main issues are developing the entire CI/CD
pipeline.

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julsimon
Cloudera explained at re:Invent 2015 how they use Docker and ECS:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a45J6xAGUvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a45J6xAGUvA)

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trcollinson
I use docker in production right now with ec2 container services and automated
deployment from gitlab-ci. Been very happy with it.

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anonfunction
We are using docker in production on google's cloud. Specifically google
container engine which is essentially kubernetes.

