Docker represents a complete paradigm shift in the way modern micro-service applications are deployed and operated. Its promise of portability, speed of innovation and scalability is unprecedented in the mainstream IT community.
It’s through been interesting to me, having worked with many of our users over the past year, to witness first hand some of the challenges as people learn the technology. It is probably pretty easy to get Docker running on one Linux server and launch a few example containers. It is not easy to move from a single host to a multi-host Docker environment.
One of the bigger challenges with Docker multi-host management lies just in ability to envision where everything is with a single Docker GUI.
In a Docker CLI world, the user SSHs into their terminal window and issues Docker commands on each individual server, or Docker host. So the user has to envision where everything is. There is no one place to query for it, or even see it. Here is an example of what it looks like when you are trying to manage 5 hosts, and are running our example Prometheus monitoring Stack, where there is a cAdvisor container on each host, posting performance metrics back to a single Prometheus dashboard. It does not appear to be very easy to get a complete picture of what is going on.
The Docker CLI gets cumbersome when managing multiple hosts
Here is the StackEngine Docker GUI view of that same environment. Notice that you see all the pertanant information; hostname, container name, the application that the container is a part of (this is unique to StackEngine), the state of the container (notice how easy it is to see that they are all running and green), the container ID, image ID and when the container was started. Easy peasy.
View an entire Docker Application running on multiple hosts in one view
Here is another StackEngine Docker GUI view, with the ability to not only see the Prometheus / cAdvisor application and its running state, but to manage it. In this example, the entire application was launched by StackEngine, and by design, any new servers that are added to my StackEngine Docker environment would automatically be provisioned with cAdvisor and appear on this screen. How crazy is that.
StackEngine provides easy to consume views of important container information
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