Container Orchestration for provisioning single containers based on user action

Question

I'm pretty new to Docker orchestration and managing a fleet of containers. I'm wanting to build an app that would give the user a container when they ran a command. What is the best tool and best way to accomplish this?

I plan on having a pool of CoreOS servers to run the containers on and I'm imagining the scheduler to have an API that I can just call to create the container.

Most of what I have seen with Nomad, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, etc is how to provision multiple clusters of containers all doing the same thing. I'm wanting to be able to create a single container based on a users command and then be able to communicate with an API on that container. Anyone have experience with this?

Answer 1

I'd look at Kubernetes + the Jobs API (short lived) or Deployments (long lived)

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by command, but I'll assume its some sort of dev env triggered by a CLI, make-dev.

1. User triggers make-dev, which sends a webhook to your app sitting in front of the Jobs API, ideally doing rate-limiting and/or auth.
2. Your app takes the command, sanity checks it, then fires off a Job/Deployment request + an Ingress rule + Service
3. Kubernetes will schedule it out across your fleet of machines
4. Your app waits for the pod to start, then returns back the address of the API with a unique identifier (the same thing in the ingress rule) like devclusters.com/foobar123
5. User now accesses their service at that address. Internally Kubernetes uses the ingress and service to route the requests to your pod

This should scale well, and if your different environments use the same base container image, they should start really fast.

Plug: If you want an easy CoreOS + Kubernetes cluster plus a UI try https://coreos.com/tectonic