Software Apps As Independent, Free Running, Self-Contained Services

The buzz phrase for elements of this (I think?) is microservices or microservice architecture (“a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services”, [ref.]) but the idea of being able to run apps anywhere (yes, really, again…!;-) seems to have been revitalised by the recent excitement around, and rapid pace of development of, docker containers.

Essentially, docker containers are isolated/independent containers that can be run in a single virtual machine. Containers can also be linked together within so that they can talk to each other and yet remain isolated from other containers in the same VM. Containers can also expose services to the outside world.

In my head, this is what I think various bits and pieces of it look like…

A couple of recent announcements from docker suggest to me at least one direction of travel that could be interesting for delivering distance education and remote and face-to-face training include:

• docker compose (fig, as was) – “with Compose, you define your application’s components – their containers, their configuration, links, volumes, and so on – in a single file, then you can spin everything up with a single command that does everything that needs to be done to get your application running.”
• docker machine – “a tool that makes it really easy to go from ‘zero to Docker’. Machine creates Docker Engines on your computer, on cloud providers, and/or in your data center, and then configures the Docker client to securely talk to them.” [Like boot2docker, but supports cloud as well?]
• Kitematic UI – “Kitematic completely automates the Docker installation and setup process and provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for running Docker containers on the Mac.” ) [Windows version coming soon]

I don’t think there is GUI support for configuration management provided out of docker directly, but presumably if they don’t buy up something like panamax they’ll be releasing their own version of something similar at some point soon?!

(With the data course currently in meltdown, I’m tempted to add a bit more to the confusion by suggesting we drop the monolithic VM approach and instead go for a containerised approach, which feels far more elegant to me… It seems to me that with a little bit of imagination, we could come up with a whole new way of supporting software delivery to students. eg an OU docker hub with an app container for each app we make available to students, container compositions for individual courses, a ‘starter kit’ DVD (like the old OLA CD-ROM) with a local docker hub to get folk up and running without big downloads etc etc. ..) It’s unlikely to happen of course – innovation seems to be too risky nowadays, despite the rhetoric…:-(

As well as being able to run docker containers locally or in the cloud, I also wonder about ‘plug and play’ free running containers that run on a wifi enabled Raspberry Pi that you can grab off the shelf, switch on, and immediately connect to? So for example, a couple of weeks ago Wolfram and Raspberry announced the Wolfram Language and Mathematica on Raspberry Pi, for free [Wolfram’s Raspberry Pi pages]. There are also crib sheets for how to run docker on a Raspberry Pi (the downside of this being that you need ARM based images rather than x86 ones), which could be interesting?

So pushing the thought a bit further, for the mythical submariner student who isn’t allowed to install software onto their work computer, could we give them a Raspberry Pi running their OU course software as service they could remotely connect to?!

PS by the by, at the Cabinet Office Code Club I help run for Open Knowledge last week, we had an issue with folk not being able to run OpenRefine properly on their machines. Fortunately, I’d fired up a couple of OpenRefine containers on a cloud host so we could still run the session as planned…