Docker and VAST Platform (VA Smalltalk) Examples

Running VA Smalltalk on Docker containers!
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This project serves as a public place where VA Smalltalk users can see and submit Docker examples. Ideally we would like to have many examples showing different operating systems, CPU architectures, alternatives and customizations.

License

• The code is licensed under MIT.
• The documentation is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Quick Start

• Install Docker in the machine you want to run the containers
• Clone this repository
• Pick of the provided examples.
• Run the Docker build and run commands that can be found in each Dockerfile
• Read blog posts:
  • Getting started with Docker and Smalltalk!
  • Step 2: Single-node Docker Swarm and Smalltalk
  • Docker Swarm cloud on a ARM64 DIY SBC cluster running a Smalltalk webapp
  • Deploying VASmalltalk on Amazon AWS ARM servers
• Watch presentations and videos:
  • "Improving VASmalltalk deployment, availability and scalability with Docker" at ESUG 2019
  • "Improving VASmalltalk deployment, availability and scalability with Docker" at Smalltalks 2019

Experiments already run

• Use docker-compose and allow having N number of replicas (our VAST images) running in the same node with a load balancer on front.
• Use Docker Swarm to create our own cloud and run N number of VAST images distributes in M number of nodes.
• Run Docker in ARM 32 bits (Raspberry Pi 3B+ and Raspbian) and ARM 64 bits (Raspberry Pi 3B+ / Rock64 with Ubuntu Server / Armbian).
• Take a look to portainer.io container for graphical management.
• Experiment with Alpine Linux. Results were not as good as expected because Alpine uses musl instead of glibc. If you install glibc then the docker image gets much bigger and quite similar to a debian slim. In addition, it's glibc does not seem to work correctly on ARM.

Next steps

There are lots of areas of interest we would like to investigate and research. But a few possibilities are:

• Make VA run with more different operating systems:
  • A regular CentOS/RedHat/Fedora variant.
  • Fedora Atomic
• Try with balenaOS as a host OS and a pigpio-ready image.
• Test our VAST GPIO binding from within a container.
• Even if not exactly related to Docker, we would also like to adapt current examples for Kubernetes and OpenShift.

Acknowledgments

• Norbert Schlemmer for the work on getting the examples to work in Raspberry.
• Julian Maestri for the initial Dockerfile examples for VA Smalltalk and general help.
• Github repository layout was generated with Ba-St Github-setup project.

Contributing

Check the Contribution Guidelines