Hi,
Containers are huge, that’s not a secret to anyone in the IT industry, customers are testing the waters and looking for many ways to utilize containers technologies, it is also not a secret that the leading vendor in this technology is docker.
But docker itself isn’t perfect yet, while it’s as trendy as trendy can get, there are many ways around the docker runtime to provide cluster management etc’..
It all started with a customer request some weeks ago, their request was “can you show us how do you integrate with docker, Marathon (to provide containers orchestration) and ClusterHQ Flocker to provide a persistent data volume”..sounds easy right? J
Wait a second, isn’t containers technologies supposed to be completely lossless, designed to fail and do not need any persistent data that will survive a failure in case a container dies??
Well, that’s exactly where customers are asking things that aren’t always part of the master design of containers technologies and where there is a gap, there is a solution..
Enter ClusterHQ with their Flocker product, taken from their website
What is Flocker?
Flocker is an open-source container data volume manager for your Dockerized applications.
By providing tools for data migrations, Flocker gives ops teams the tools they need to run containerized stateful services like databases in production.
Unlike a Docker data volume which is tied to a single server, a Flocker data volume, called a dataset, is portable and can be used with any container in your cluster.
Flocker manages Docker containers and data volumes together. When you use Flocker to manage your stateful microservice, your volumes will follow your containers when they move between different hosts in your cluster.
Container Manager and Storage Integrations
Flocker is designed to work with the other tools you are using to build and run your distributed applications. Flocker can be used with popular container managers or orchestration tools like Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos.
For storage, Flocker supports block-based shared storage such as Amazon EBS, or OpenStack Cinder so you can choose the storage backend that is best for your application. Read more about choosing the best storage backend for your application. You can also use Flocker to take advantage of pre-defined storage profiles that are offered by many storage providers. Find out more about Flocker’s storage profile support.
How is related to EMC XtremIO you might wonder, well, as the #1 sold AFA in the market, we are starting to get many requests like these and so, together with ClusterHQ, there is now a support for EMC XtremIO to provide this functionality.
If you want to see a full demo of a MySQL app failing over, look no further
I also wanted to give an huge thank you to Dadee Birgher from my team who set it all up in no time.
