33 What is Docker?

Docker is a relativly new technology to encapsulate software as a service. This allow for simple distribution of software since all depedencies are installed as well. Unlike traditional VM’s, in docker each component will only run a single service/process and is build on top of existing services provided by the host OS (such as disk access, networking, memory managment etc.). To create a complex system such as PEcAn, we take multiple of these components and link them together.

A common term used in docker is that of an image or container. This refers to all the software needed to run a single service, including the service itself, bundled and installed. The difference between an image and a container is that a container is the execution of an image (in object oriented programming, an image is a class and a container is an instance of the class). When creating docker images a good mental model to follow is to have a single process per container, and have multiple containers together create an application.

For example in the case of BETY we will need at least two processes, the database and the BETY web application. When distributing a VM with the BETY application we will need to create VM with a base OS (in our case this would be Ubuntu), a database (PostgreSQL) and the BETY webapp (ruby). This requires us to install the dependencies and applications. In the case of Docker, we will need a container for the database (standard postgis container) as well as the custom BETY container (build on top of the exising Ruby container), both running on a host OS (coreOS for example). When starting BETY we start the postgis container first, and next start the BETY container telling it where it can find the postgis container. To upgrade we stop the BETY container, download the latest version, tell it to upgrade the database, and start the BETY container. There is no need to install new dependencies for BETY since they are all shipped as part of the container.

In the case of PEcAn we want to use this ability to ship all dependencies as part of the image to make it easier for the users to download a new model, since the image will contain everything that is needed to run the model as part of PEcAn. If two models depend on different versions of the library we no longer need to worry on how to install these models next to each other and creating issues with the libraries used. Each image will contain only a single model and all libraries needed by that model.

The next section, architecture will go in more detail on the containers that make up the PEcAn framework and how these containers interact with each other.

THIS IS EXPERIMENTAL DO NOT USE THIS IN PRODUCTION SUBJECT TO CHANGE