Container workloads have the potential to redefine how we think about scale and hosted infrastructure.
Last Fall, Ubiquity Hosting and RackN announced a 200 node Docker Swarm cluster as a phase one of our collaboration. Unlike cloud-based container workloads demonstrations, we chose to run this cluster directly on the bare metal.
Why bare metal instead of virtualized? We believe that metal offers additional performance, availability and control.
With the cluster automation ready, we’re looking for customers to help us prove those assumptions. While we could simply build on many VMs, our analysis is the a lot of smaller nodes will distribute work more efficiently. Since there is no virtualization overhead, lower RAM systems can still give great performance.
The collaboration with RackN allows us to offer customers a rapid, repeatable cluster capability. Their Digital Rebar automation works on a broad spectrum of infrastructure allow our users to rehearse deployments on cloud, quickly change components and iteratively tune the cluster.
We’re finding that these dedicated metal nodes have much better performance than similar VMs in AWS? Don’t believe us – you can use Digital Rebar to spin up both and compare. Since Digital Rebar is an open source platform, you can explore and expand on it.
The Docker Swarm deployment is just a starting point for us. We want to hear your provisioning ideas and work to turn them into reality.
Sounds like a good idea…
I completed a 6 month contract for a large publisher involving the evaluation of various triple stores. I created a dockerfile for each triple store allowing us to quickly install the systems when required on various servers. I also created a system to monitor and graph the memory use of any number docker containers. They are a number of stumbling blocks that takes some experience to understand.
Regards
Alex
http://Www.tilogeo.com