When a small platform for shipping containers is needed, not speaking about Kubernets or something, you have a couple of common things you might want to deploy at first.
Usual things that I have to roll out everytime deloying such a platform:
- docker
- docker-compose
- Watchtower - automatically updating and restarting containers
- Træfik - modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer
Bootstraping docker and docker-compose
Most services are build upon multiple containers. A useful tool for doing this is for example docker-compose where you can describe your whole 'application'. So we need to deploy it beside docker itself.
Deploying Watchtower
An essential operational part is to keep you container images up to date.
Watchtower is an application that will monitor your running Docker containers and watch for changes to the images that those containers were originally started from. If watchtower detects that an image has changed, it will automatically restart the container using the new image.
Deploying http(s) reverse proxy Træfik
If you want to provide multiple (web)services on port 80 and 443, you have to think about how this should be solved. Usually you would use a http(s) reverse proxy, there are many of software implementations available.
The challenging part in such an environment is that services may appear and disappear frequently. (Re)-configuration of the proxy service it the gap that needs to be closed.
Træfik (pronounced like traffic) is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease [...] to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.
Træfik has many interesting features for example 'Let's Encrypt support (Automatic HTTPS with renewal)'.