[OOTB-hive] Thoughts on Honeycomb that need your input

Thu Jun 23 16:06:16 BST 2016

I was looking at the docker-alfresco project you are referring to. It
scared me away due to its complexity. Seems there is no way to run a
basic setup without container orchestration (which is complicated). It
comes with its own tool (grua). There is nothing wrong with fine grained
containers depending on each other as long as operating and maintaining
them is easy and stable. I do not feel OOTB has the resources to ensure
this today and I feared this project may become a maintainance burden. I
wanted something which immediately offers me value on a daily basis. I
wanted it to be dead simple to spin up a basic dev environment and to
enable basic production usage as well.

People at Alfresco have containers on their radar, and I am sure we will
see serious efforts coming from them. I'd appreciate to hear what they
are up to in this regard - short and medium term - to keep in line with
them.

Personally, I do not care about VMs, hypervisors and their toolchains.
Hence, I don't want those things to get in the way when working with
dockerized Alfresco. It may still make sense to share basic shell
scripts or things along those lines with efforts focusing around
virtualization.

cheers
Andreas

On 06/23/2016 09:29 AM, Daren Firminger wrote:
> Hi Andreas
>
> I did get involved with helping Martin move the distro forward, I also
> didnt know anything about puppet before hand, but now can see how
> useful it is for deploying production ready apps.  I also worked on
> the docker-alfresco build, a pure docker build, did you check that
> out?  https://github.com/marsbard/docker-alfresco, maybe you could
> help us move that forward?  still couldnt get a docker built version
> on same hardware as puppet installed version to perform as well, we
> have broken the apps into their seperate containers, easily allows
> libreoffice to be moved off etc etc, but needs some love.
>
> cheers
>
> Daren
>
>
> On 23/06/2016 07:50, Andreas Steffan wrote:
>> On 06/22/2016 11:55 PM, Nick Burch wrote:
>>> I'm not sure about that. I'd lean more towards "should be easy to
>>> consume" and "should target those interested in using an open-source
>>> ECM, and those interested in helping expand it".
>>>
>>>> Regarding the second point, there has been a lot of hard work done to
>>>> Puppet-ize the Honeycomb installation. That is great, we don't want
>>>> to stop doing that. For people who have Puppet in their environments
>>>> or are willing to introduce it, using Puppet to automate the install
>>>> has a lot of value.
>>> 2 years ago, lots of people I spoke to were using puppet for
>>> everything. Today, the "buzz" seems to be around containers,
>>> especially for trying things out. I've come across quite a few people
>>> who try and develop with containers, then use the likes of puppet to
>>> manage production roll-out. It's been a while since I met anyone who
>>> said "when I want to try something new, I go looking for
>>> puppet/chef/ansible rules to deploy my trial instance"
>>>
>>> Back when Alfresco was just getting started, one-click installers were
>>> the big thing for letting people easily try it out. I doubt many
>>> production installs were done with the installer, but a large number
>>> of people trying it for the first time found it convenient and
>>> most-easy to get started. (The people in engineering maintaining it
>>> much less so...). These days, it seems that "spin up a container" or
>>> "spin something up in the cloud" seem to be the more popular "I wonder
>>> what that's like, can I quickly try it" route.
>>>
>>> When it comes to containers, Docker seems to have the big edge right
>>> now, though that may change with time. Orchestration frameworks (for
>>> deploying multiple inter-linked containers) there still seems to be a
>>> big fight/debate going on, so a single container with everything in
>>> might be safest even if it offends the microserves crowd!
>>>
>>> So, my suggestion would be:
>>>   * General instructions on building a container image
>>>   * Docker image (frequently refreshed due to various issues with how
>>>     containers work and age...)
>>>   * Links to tutorials on how to spin up the docker image locally
>>> and on
>>>     Amazon (free instances available to all) and on Azure (free
>>> instances
>>>     given away to most Microsoft customers one way or another)
>>>   * War files for more advanced users
>>>   * Deployment scripts (eg puppet) for advanced users
>>>   * Build steps + scripts + instructions for converting users to
>>>     contributors
>> I originally volunteered to work the distro.
>>
>> With all respect to Martins efforts, it was Puppet which made me step
>> back. For the simple reasons that I knew almost nothing about it and
>> that I felt it will never be very helpful for me. I was (and still am)
>> betting on Docker. Seems I am not the only one in Alfresco Land these
>> days.
>>
>> However, seems everybody is brewing his/her own Alfresco Docker food and
>> is preferring to move fast instead of far. Recently, I have been looking
>> at other peoples efforts again to check whether I see hope to join
>> forces. Didn't find it and decided to move on by myself for the
>> following reasons:
>>
>> I  want as little effort as possible, and I don't want to go a route
>> duplicating efforts. I don't want to maintain a ton of scripts and
>> whatnot which break every now and then. Ideally, I would like to build
>> on top of sustainable efforts driven by Alfresco Inc.
>>
>> Looked closely at Alfresco SPK, but abandoned it due to all the
>> complexity (Vagrant, Packer, Virtualbox, Chef) it introduces while
>> offering  no benefit (for our use cases).
>>
>> Ironically, my docker Alfresco images leverage the old school installer
>> - Because of simplicity and stability.
>>
>> regards
>> Andreas
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OOTB-hive mailing list
> OOTB-hive at xtreamlab.net
> http://www.xtreamlab.net/mailman/listinfo/ootb-hive

-- 
Andreas Steffan

Achter Billing 14
22399 Hamburg
Germany

skype: deas0815
M: +49 160 4694826
T: +49 40 23943542
F: +49 40 23943542

http://www.contentreich.de

Contentreich : Alfresco ECM, Clojure, Groovy und WordPress - aus Spaß und für Geld