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Best Practices for Managing Multiple Apps on Flatcar?

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D C

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Aug 23, 2024, 2:06:57 PM8/23/24
to Flatcar Container Linux User

Hello,

I've been exploring Flatcar and am impressed so far. I'm considering it for production workloads and would like to hear about strategies for managing multiple applications.

I currently use Ignition with systemd to manage a single app per server, but I'm looking for ideas on how to handle 2-5 apps without needing a server reboot for small changes.

Do you use the Docker API, Docker Compose with SSH, or another method? I'm aiming for a setup with standalone systems with few dependencies so I'm not using Kubernetes for thees workloads.

Any advice on managing app lifecycles would be appreciated  (as well as any tips on fleets of standalone flatcars)

Thanks!

Neil Mayhew

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Aug 23, 2024, 2:54:05 PM8/23/24
to Flatcar Container Linux User
Flatcar is very much geared towards container-based workloads and I don't recommend running apps on the bare OS.

I use docker-compose. Although it's primarily intended for development rather than production, my app setup is fairly simple and docker-compose works well enough.

I use ssh when I want to force a rebuild of the container images and a restart of the apps. However, most of the time I use a scheduled task (using systemd) to check whether any of the packages in the app containers would be updated with apt-get and then trigger a rebuild and restart if so.

I use Ansible to set up the apps after some basic OS configuration with Ignition.

Neil Mayhew

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Aug 23, 2024, 3:00:38 PM8/23/24
to Flatcar Container Linux User
Looking back on your message, it's possible you were talking about using docker-compose on your local system to manage a Flatcar instance remotely. That's not what I'm doing. I run docker-compose once, directly on the remote system to configure and start the containers. After that, the Docker daemon will restart them automatically, eg on a reboot.

I also rebuild the images directly on the remote system, also using docker-compose.

D C

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Aug 26, 2024, 4:03:10 AM8/26/24
to Flatcar Container Linux User
Right I said apps but i should have said containers. 
This was the same approach i used on my old debian cluster and may do so here as well.

I've been toying with maybe using ansible or terraform to do the interaction with docker, and ideally not ssh into the machine at all.
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