Few weeks back I was working on a proof of concept to demonstrate a long running workflow based orchestration scenario. More about the architecture behind the PoC can be found at WSO2 solutions architecture blog. But this blog is not related to the architecture, this is simply about delivering the proof of concept in a completely contained environment.
What inspired me to do this: As a day to day job I happened to show how enterprise solutions architectures work in real world. I cook up a use-case in my machine, often with couple of WSO2 products (like the ESB/DSS/DAS/API-M) and some other non-WSO2 ones, then demonstrate the setup to who ever the interested party. I always thought it would be cool if the audience can run this themselves after the demo without any hassle (They can run it even now with bit of work 😉 but thats time someone can easily save). The other motivation is to save my own time by re-using the demos I’ve build.
Docker ! Docker ! Docker !
I’ve been playing with docker on and off, thought its a cool technology and I found that creating and destroying containers in a matter of milliseconds is kind of fun 😀 okey jokes aside I was looking for a way to do something useful with Docker, and finally found inspiration and the time.
I took the orchestration PoC (Bulk ordering work-flow for book publishers) as the base model that I am going to Dockerize.
I made sure that I cover my bases first with making everything completely remotely deployable. If am to build a completely automated deployment and a start up process I shouldn’t configure any of the products from the management UI.
@nuwanbando 