[Container-tools] Rethinking Nulecule

[Lalatendu Mohanty]

On 03/10/2016 11:29 PM, Lalatendu Mohanty wrote:
> On 03/10/2016 08:15 PM, Aaron Weitekamp wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 4:29 AM, Ratnadeep Debnath <rtnpro at gmail.com> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi all,
>>
>>     Till now, Nulecule's focus has been to be a spec to package and ship
>>     nested, composable multi container applications. Well, it helps us to
>>     focus on a smaller problem and solve it well. This also keeps
>>     implementation of Nulecule, e.g., atomicapp, lean and simple.
>>
>>     However, is it enough?
>>
>>
>>     I will try to highlight a few shortcomings of the current
>>     Nulecule spec:
>>
>>     - the spec file does not fully describe the architecture of the
>>     applications
>>     - it's difficult to get started with Nulecule as it requires
>>     knowledge
>>     of underlying providers
>>     - it's not possible to use the same Nulecule spec to deploy a
>>     Nulecule
>>     application across providers without writing artifacts for each
>>     provider
>>
>>
>>     So, we are thinking in the lines of extending Nulecule SPEC to
>>     describe a multi container application completely in the SPEC file,
>>     similar to Docker compose file. This will enable us to:
>>
>>     - to automatically generate artifact files for underlying providers
>>     from the SPEC file
>>     - to override the generated artifact files, if needed
>>
>>
>>     The advantages of such a change would be:
>>
>>     - zero barrier entry for developers
>>     - package once, in one language, and deploy anywhere
>>
>>
>>     This move will be beneficial to:
>>
>>     - developers, with little knowledge about openshift, k8s,
>>     marathon, etc.
>>
>>
>> ​I disagree that we can shoulder the burden of making openshift or 
>> kubernetes or anything else easier to use. We haven't been successful 
>> making our own tooling easy to use and adopt. The platform has to do 
>> this work.
>
> I think we all agree that Nulecule is a great idea. But to make it 
> successful with respect to community  we need to make writing of 
> Nulecule spec relatively easier than writing Kubernetes configuration 
> files.
>
> Either we take this task along with Nulecule/Atomic App or work with 
> Kubernetes project to do it. We can work with Kubernetes project for 
> this, but what should we do with other providers e.g. Mesos.
>
> I am taking Kubernetes example because if we fix it it will be 
> applicable to OpenShift too. Point to note that writing Docker compose 
> files  is already easy as compared to Kubernetes configuration files.
>
> So the experience should be better then writing Kubernetes files and 
> better or equal to writing Docker compose files.
>

One of the advantage of Nulecule/Atomic App is we don't have to move a 
tar ball with all the artifacts with custom scripts  and instructions to 
deploy the application in different environments e.g. test, production 
etc. However with containers  automated pipeline which would move the 
application from test to production makes more sense and it kind of 
dilutes the advantage.

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