i2kit
The simplicity of containers, the security of virtual machines.
i2kit combines the simplicity of containers to develop your applications with the security and robustness of virtual machines for production environments at scale.
i2kit won't force a development environment on you, keep using what works for you.
Once you're ready to deploy, define your application deployment behavior using a YAML file (à la docker-compose) and i2kit will make the rest for you. i2kit builds an extremely lightweight virtual machine for each of your containers/pods using linuxkit, which not only brings the workload isolation and security advantages of virtual machines, but also seamlessly plug into proven cloud vendor technology. For example, if AWS is the cloud provider of your choice, i2kit will:
- Balance traffic to your Container VMs using ELBs.
- Enforce fault tolerance using autoscalability groups.
- Provide service discovery using Route 53 domains.
- Connect your containers using a VPC network.
- Persist your data volumes using EBS.
i2kit does not require a central control plane to manage your running applications (à la Docker Swarm or Kubernetes), which not only reduces configuration, maintenance and infrastructure costs, but also eliminates critical runtime dependencies in your applications.
Check our paper for full details about the i2kit behavior.
Getting Started
Now, build the i2kit binary:
go build -o /usr/local/bin/i2kit
Create an environment.yml configuration as documented here.
In particular, you will need to have a hosted zone configured in Route53.
Once you have your environment ready, execute the following command:
i2kit deploy -s samples/nginx/service.yml -e environment.yml
After the command finishes, you can browse to nginx.your_hosted_zone_here to verify that nginx is running as expected.
Finally, destroy your service by executing the following command:
i2kit destroy -s samples/nginx/service.yml -e environment.yml
Service Manifest gives more information about how to create your own Service Manifests.
Environment Manifest gives more information about how to create your own Environment Manifests.