Adventures in docker and portainer

Around 2007 I was gifted some old hardware which entailed an ASUS motherboard, 8Gb or RAM and an AMD CPU.

It wasn't until a few years later that I decided to build it into a home server.

There was no hardware virtualisation and either I didn't know how to do or didn't want to do software virtualisation and software RAID, instead all my services, DHCP, DNS, SAMBA, FTP etc. and I think even Plex as well (or maybe that came later) was running co-resident on a bare-metal JBOD server.

Since it was simple design, it was relatively simple to operate and maintain. I even managed to successfully P2V the server when I did a hardware refresh and it continued operating for the most part.

One day I upgraded the system and a Python-based application which catastrophically broke and I since abandoned picking it back up until recently because I discovered Docker containers.

Fast-forward to today, now I have a big proponent of my services and apps hosted in a dedicated docker-engine VM and maintenance has never been easier.

I've even learned how to share the same network namespace as other containers such as stacking a container with a VPN container and all it took was using the following in the compose file under the containers service definition:

network_mode: "container:<container>"

Which, I leaned and adapted the above from the following YouTube video:

How to route any docker container through a VPN container

Further to this my Docker engine VM is exclusively managed now using portainer.io where I can easily create and delete (and in the process upgrade) containers with ease, which means everything stays fresh and all I have to be concerned about is backing up the persistent storage!

Armed with knowledge of how docker works, I've written up slide deck on docker to help demystify docker containers and hopefully improve overall understanding for the potentially emerging DevOps capability.