DeployMan
Yesterday, I published a tool called DeployMan on GitHub. DeployMan is a command line tool to deploy Docker images to AWS and was the software prototype for my master thesis. I wrote my thesis at Informatica in Stuttgart-Weilimdorf, so first of all, I want to say thank you to Thomas Kasemir for the opportunity to put this online!
Disclaimer
At the time I am writing this post, DeployMan is a pure prototype. It was created for academic research and as a demo for my thesis. It is not ready ready for production. If you need a solid tool to deploy Docker images (to AWS), have a look at Puppet, CloudFormation (for AWS), Terraform, Vagrant, fig (for Docker) or any other orchestration tool that came up in the last couple of years.
What DeployMan does
DeployMan can create new AWS EC2 instances and deploy a predefined stack of Docker images on it. To do so, DeployMan takes a configuration file called a formation. A formation specifies how the EC2 machine should look like and which Docker images (and which configurations) should be deployed. Docker images can either be deployed from a Docker registry (the public one or a private) or a tarballs from a S3 storage. Together with each image, a configuration folder will pulled from a S3 storage and mounted to the running container.
Here is an example of a formation which deploys a Nginx server with a static HTML page:
{ “name”: “Nginx”, “description”: “A Nginx server with a static HTML page.”,
"machine": {
"name": "nginx",
"instance\_type": "m1.medium",
"security\_group": "launch-wizard-1",
"image\_id": "ami-9282eba2",
"auto\_sync": "false",
"containers": \[
{
"name": "Nginx",
"image": "dockerfile/nginx",
"config": "configs/UI-Nginx",
"command": "docker run -d -p 80:80 -v /static:/var/www/static -v /config:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled dockerfile/nginx"
}
\]
} }
Interfaces
DeployMan provides a command line interface to start instances and do some basic monitoring of the deployment process. Here is a screenshot which shows some formations (which can be started) and the output of a started Logstash server:
To keep track of the deployment process in a more pleasant way, DeployMan has a web interface. The web interface shows details to machines, such as the deployed images and which containers are running. Here is how a Logstash server would look like:
The project
You can find the project on GitHub at https://github.com/tuhrig/DeployMan. I wrote a detailed README.md which explains how to build and use DeployMan. To test DeployMan, you need an AWS account (there are also free accounts).
The project is made with Java 8, Maven, the AWS Java API, the Docker Java API and a lot of small stuff like Apache Commons. The web interface is based on Spark (for the server), Google’s AngularJS and Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS.
Best regards, Thomas