CODEWITHSUNDEEP
docker
Jiva DeVoe
Jiva DeVoe

Reputation: 33

Docker: One image per user? Or one image for all users?

Question about Docker best practices/intended use:

I have docker working, and it's cool. I run a PaaS company, and my intent is maybe to use docker to run individual instances of our service for a given user.

So now I have an image that I've created that contains all the stuff for our service... and I can run it. But once I want to set it up for a specific user, theres a set of config files that I will need to modify for each user's instance.

So... the question is: Should that be part of my image filesystem, and hence, I then create a new image (based on my current image, but with their specific config files inside it) for each user?

Or should I put those on the host filesystem in a set of directories, and map the host filesystem config files into the correct running container for each user (hence, having only one image shared among all users)?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2208

Answers (1)

Mark O'Connor
Mark O'Connor

Reputation: 77961

Modern PAAS systems favour building an image for each customer, creating versioned copies of both software and configuration. This follows the "Build, release, run" recommendation of the 12 factor app website:

An docker based example is Deis. It uses Heroku build packs to customize the software application environment and the environment settings are also baked into a docker image. At run-time these images are run by chef on each application server.

This approach works well with Docker, because images are easy to build. The challenge I think is managing the docker images, something the docker registry is designed to support.

Upvotes: 6

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