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Container Technology/Flocker: Simplifying the Migration of Apps and Data Servers
Moving an application installed on one machine to another one has traditionally been a tedious task. But ClusterHQ provides an elegant solution to the problem that they’re calling Flocker, and today they are announcing an update to that solution, release 0.3. Flocker makes it possible to move the components of multi-server applications and associated data volumes to different servers. It’s particularly useful for moving containers running applications, databases, and data-backed services between servers in one or more clouds.
ClusterHQ’s Flocker product is based on the popular Docker software. Docker is a container technology that’s seen phenomenal growth and acceptance since it was first released in March 2013. A Docker container is similar in concept to a virtual machine, but considerably lighter weight. Virtual machines emulate an entire server device and don’t make good use of the physical resources on the machine where they run. Containers, on the other hand, abstract just the operating system kernel. Unlike VMs, individual containers share a single base operating system, making them much leaner, smaller and more efficient. Their leaner design translates to a much higher possible density of server instances. It’s possible to run as many as six times the number of containers on a single physical server as the number of VMs that could run on the same machine.
Flocker lets developers deploy their entire app, including its databases, to multiple hosts, and then migrate them later as operations demands.
Benefits of Flocker version 0.3 include:
- Integration with Docker Fig for describing complex applications
- Entire applications, including databases, queues and key-value stores can be deployed to multiple servers
- Easily migrate containers and their data between different hosts
Luke Marsden, founder and CTO of ClusterHQ, said that “adding Fig support to Flocker enables enterprise DevOps teams to move their applications and databases from development to staging to production much more easily than before. This new functionality brings Flocker closer to production readiness and to providing the critical data-backed services that will allow the container industry to scale at an even greater pace.”
