[erlang-questions] Erlang and Docker

[Dmitry Kolesnikov]

Hello,

We are using Docker + Erlang for multiple purposes:

a) cross platform assembly of Erlang application release (e.g. using Mac to build production Linux images)

b) in production to achieve blue-green deployment, isolate complex external dependencies or production deployment of Erlang application performed on hosts running vanilla Linux distribution. The major assumption -- Erlang/OTP runtime is not installed on target host. The application needs to package and deliver Erlang runtime along with its code.

Erlang VM has very good isolation and cross-platform support by itself. The docker might look as an overhead. The best what is can bring is the optimisation of management practice.

I’ve played with Docker public / private repositories and container image assembly from Docker file on target host. The image assembly is more appealing to me and it is successfully used by us in production.

We are using Amazon, and I’ve tried to use Elastic Beanstalk and EC2 Container service. They are fine if you are building Erlang-based front-end where nodes do not talk each other. The challenge comes if you are building complicated Erlang cluster or tries to deploy existed Erlang software (e.g. Riak). Thus Chef / OpsWorks is more optimal to make life-cycle management and deployment practices. 


Best Regards, 
Dmitry


> On 18 Jun 2015, at 09:10, Stefan Hellkvist <hellkvist@REDACTED> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Just out of curiosity, is anyone out there using Docker to deploy your Erlang releases? Any experiences captured in any blog out there? I am in particular interested in what docker images people are basing their deployments on. 
> 
> Personally I have used various Ubuntu images of varying sizes and also the phusion/baseimage (https://github.com/phusion/baseimage-docker) with good results but I would like to hear particularly if anyone has found any images with small footprints out there, capable of running Erlang releases (which is not a well defined requirement I guess, but still).
> 
> Stefan
> 
> 
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