RC1 of the Label Schema spec was just announced by Gareth Rushgrove of Puppet at the Container Camp conference in London. The spec is a community effort from multiple companies including Puppet, Mesosphere, Microscaling Systems and Container Solutions.
The spec is a release candidate so we'd like to get as much feedback as possible from the community. Here is a good place to discuss it but please also send feedback to the Label Schema mailing list.
Hi, I'm Ross one of the developers at Force12.io. We just launched a major update to our container scaling demo. You can now run your own container images and control how many containers appear in the demo.
We've also added sign up with GitHub to make it easier to create an account. If you've got any questions or feedback on the demo we'd love to hear from you.
Yes the tool we've released today is for playing with and not production use. It's single host to keep things simple. Definitely agree for production use a multiple host cluster is essential for redundancy.
We think the faster launch times of containers makes auto scaling easier compared to using VMs. So our tool will prioritise the mix of running containers based on current demand.
To do this we'll need to support multiple metrics. Some of those will be within the cluster like CPU and RAM. But some may be external like the length of a message queue or requests per second on a load balancer.
We're working on a container scaling solution that runs on top of the scheduler. It will scale containers based on current demand. There is overlap with the Swarm strategies but we're focused on auto scaling. So for example we'll use the scheduler to provide fault tolerance.
The demo tool we've released today is single node and uses the Docker Remote API. We've also built demos that integrate with the ECS and Marathon schedulers. Force12 will be platform agnostic. So we plan to integrate with more schedulers and Swarm is definitely on that list.
I think the reduced attack surface and faster startup times will have a big impact eventually.
At the moment language choice is a blocker for me. I don't want to have to learn OCaml to play with unikernels. LING looks interesting since its based on Erlang. If I could develop on Elixir that would make a big difference.
London has a similar issue with house prices / rents continuing to rise much faster than the rest of the UK.
I relocated from London to Barcelona 3 years ago to do remote freelance work. The cost of living is lower here with a good quality of life. There is lots of interesting work in London and its a good place to gain experience but I've got no plans to go back.
Elastic Beanstalk is a wrapper for multiple AWS services. The Docker multi container version uses ECS for containers. Using ECS directly can be more work but it also gives more control.
EB works the same way for VMs, it will integrate with EC2 for you or you can use EC2 directly instead of EB.
You've probably seen it but for Elastic Beanstalk there is now a multi container version which uses ECS under the hood. Previously there was a limitation of 1 container per VM.
Yes this is based on the trial release of ECS. Some extra features were added in the GA release last month. There is now ECS support in the AWS web console Also ECS Services can automatically register containers with an Elastic Load Balancer.
We launched http://force12.io on Friday which is a demo of container autoscaling running on ECS. I'll be doing a blog post this week on how we're using ECS.
Thanks these are great questions. We do want to open source the scheduler but we wanted to launch the demo first. This is to get people talking about auto scaling with containers and to build what we learn into the scheduler.
I definitely agree that there is a place for auto scaling both VMs and containers. Auto scaling with VMs means if it takes several minutes to add a VM to the cluster you have to scale up early and scale down slowly. We think auto scaling with containers can help a lot here by smoothing out the demand. Lower priority containers can be stopped while extra VM capacity is added.
I think vertical search engines are part of the answer too. For general search engines Google have such an advantage in data and R&D that only Microsoft can afford to compete.
On the data side I think http://commoncrawl.org/ can help with creating vertical search engines. Their crawl is much smaller than Google or Bing but it is web scale (2 billion pages of 2013 data). Data recency is still a problem but it can help with finding which sites belong to a niche. Some smaller scale crawling of these sites would then be a much more achievable task.
I think this provides a lower level mechanism for managing nodes. Both ELB and RDS use EBS and have been hit in the past by the knock on effects of EBS outages.
I think this makes it easier to manage your own load balancers using instance storage without EBS.
The spec is a release candidate so we'd like to get as much feedback as possible from the community. Here is a good place to discuss it but please also send feedback to the Label Schema mailing list.