While working with AWS’ rudimentary image bootstrapping, allowing me to either boot and configure from a supported image, or directly boot from our own custom image, I came to realize the price and frustration for this archaic mechanism of bringing up a new operational node to scale out or update/rollback nodes. There had to be a better way.

So I started looking around for other ways of deploying and managing infrastructure. And there was Docker! It was a couple of months old, but I was sure it would take the world by storm and started experimenting with it. It would allow me to build one image with all the necessary infrastructure to run an app, and deploy it everywhere! And if I needed to upgrade part(s) of the infrastructure, I could do so very easily, and just have my nodes update by pulling in diffs! Super cool!

Now I knew I was slowly being sucked into DevOps land, but just had to go with my guts and explore this beautiful new territory, even tho it wasn’t my core expertise I was building on. This attitude allowed me to dive right in and get to know the ins and outs and the do’s and dont’s of building docker architectures. I don’t want to give detailed instructions how to do things on this blog, because there is enough of that to be found, but let me just do what I do best, and that is to inspire others to try the stuff I am excited about.
And if it’s one thing I am very excited about, it is Docker and this whole new movement in DevOps land, with such things as CoreOS utilizing automated centralized configuration managment such as EtcD. There’s a whole slew of PaaS offerings coming our way, and our developers lives will be made a whole lot easier thanks to the initial work of the dotCloud people 🙂