[OOTB-hive] Docker(/Kubernetes) - My ideas for potential work (re: Daren's mail)

[Angel Borroy]

Nice idea, Axel.

I’m open to collaborate, despite my basic skills on Docker, k8s and many other relevant software involved in the “new” Alfresco.

Now that Alfresco is ignoring deliberatively the Community (ACS 6.1 will be published without having a Community equivalent), it’s time to act. Probably providing a deployment and developing environment for everyone is the right approach.

I’m not able to organise this initiative, but let me know if I can help in any way.

Best,

Angel Borroy
keensoft a UST Global company

email:   angel.borroy at keensoft.es
web:     http://www.keensoft.es
móvil:  +34 655 47 47 55

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On 25 November 2018 at 22:57:06, Axel Faust (axel.faust.g at googlemail.com) wrote:

Hello guys,

TL;DR: Instead of revisiting our previous pre-bundled Community build
idea, maybe more short-term / easier to realize value could be gained by
collaborating on guides / documentation / examples regarding Docker
deployments to help community members make the switch, AND/OR create a
standard build setup (in lieu of an updated Alfresco SDK that may never
arrive) incorporating the new deployment approach and achieving full
compatibility with the most recent Alfresco releases.

This mail is a revisit of a mail Daren sent in the middle of the thread
for volunteers for the DevCon talk submission review ([1]). I don't know
how many actually read the mail considering the misleading subject line.
In it he asked if there is interest in revisiting our previous work
around a pre-bundled Alfresco Community build (at the time using puppet)
and maybe adapted / updating that to be in line with the current Docker
/ Kubernetes approach.

In the last two months I have had the (dis-)pleasure to familiarize
myself with the current state of the Alfresco Docker and Helm charts /
Kubernetes work in preparation for a training at an Alfresco partner.
Anyone following me on Twitter might have seen a rant or two. It
certainly is not the most intuitive and not helped by the fact that
Alfresco tends to break stuff shortly after providing an initially
working state.

Given how tricky it can be for community members / customers to switch
over to the new approach without any prior experience, I would say that
any guides / documentation that we as the Order could collaboratively
put together would be much more valuable/needed at this point than
simply revisiting the pre-bundled build. As both the Docker Compose
scripts and Helm charts from Alfresco should only be considered as a
starting point / reference rather than a ready-to-use setup, we might
also want to look into providing improved variants for these (Helm may
be a lower priority as it/Kubernetes likely is not relevant for most
community users). I know that Angel has already done work in the area of
an improved compose reference ([2]) - maybe that could be a starting
point to flesh out / improve upon...

In my training I have also integrated the new Docker images as a runtime
environment for ("not-really-rapid") application development in my Maven
setup, and also used it for the integration tests therein. In another,
personal project I have started to use Docker containers even for my
regular unit tests.
Alfresco has still not released a SDK natively compatible with Alfresco
6, and given their long-term goal of moving customers/users off of
in-process extensions may likely not provide an updated version anytime
soon. I know most people in the Order have sufficient skill to adapt the
current SDK to work with 6, but that is likely not true for most
community users out there. So maybe we as the Order should look into
providing a reference build setup of our own, using the new
incorporating the new Docker approach as best as possible. And maybe
such work will naturally lead us to general improvements / definition of
a base image e.g. with regards to image size, code+test round-trip time
etc...

Regards

Axel


[1]
http://lists.xtreamlab.net/pipermail/ootb-hive/2018-September/001028.html

[2] https://github.com/keensoft/docker-alfresco

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