Containers and Microservices

2019: Literally everyone at work was telling me I HAD to learn Docker.  Network Chuck was telling me I HAD to learn Docker NOW!  My Google suggestions were full of Docker tutorials and ads for “thecontainerstore.com.”  I really have been meaning to clean up my lab…

Then it happened, I ran out of CPU cores when I tried to spin up a VM. “I think Louis told me this is why Docker is great.”  Literally 20 minutes later and I had NetBox (https://netbox.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) up and running, and I was sitting there with my mind blown.  It’s really truly awesome, kind of like digital folder system for filing away network services and applications.  A couple years later and the picture below show a generic diagram of what I have running in my lab.

Full disclosure, the Docker containers are all running on Docker Desktop on a Windows machine, but in my work lab I have an Ubuntu VM running many of my containers.  I did setup a Kubernetes environment, once with Containerd and once with Docker, it was fun to run a couple containers and see it scale horizontally, but without more CPU’s, I just didn’t have the resources to setup multiple pods and practice shifting workloads, much less run all the services I wanted to play with.

After I shut down the Kubernetes architecture, I shifter back to Docker and started on my IOT project.