Hi, I'm involved in a project [1] that is based on Karaf and Camel. We recently produced a milestone that involved a working demonstration of the code base using Docker [2]. This was one of our first forays into this technology stack, so we not only came away with some impressions of the stack but also noted some of the same questions you ask with regard to the various containerization choices.
Fundamentally, we noted that that properly testing our code to work in an OSGI container is challenging and time consuming (we used Pax Exam [3]); we would spend more time fiddling around with the test fixtures than actually writing tests and fixing any bugs they illuminated. Secondarily, we struggled at times to find and resolve any conflicts in our Maven dependency tree related to using an OSGI bundle instead of a dependency's non-OSGI counterpart. We also struggled with some of the nuances of running Karaf and Camel, including discovering bugs in each of these frameworks or their components. All of that being said, the result is something we are very pleased with. In order to produce our milestone demo, we containerized all of our services, which included two different instances of Karaf, an RDF triple store (Java web application server), the Fedora 4 linked data repository [4] (Java web application server), and other services (also a Java web application server). The exercise of producing this Dockerized milestone was very illuminating; we worked out some additional architectural issues and other bugs that our integration tests by themselves didn't do (and later added additional ITs to cover these discovered issues). Personally, my observation is that there seems to be a lot of overlap in containerization technologies, but it seems the levels of abstraction differ with different tradeoffs. For example, if you desire classloader isolation, you could use a single instance of Karaf running multiple services, or you could simply spin up a Docker container for each service, running each service in a traditional web app container. You'd have to decide if embracing Karaf and OSGI way of doing things is better than working with "heavy" Docker containers and traditional, stable, well-understood Java application servers like Jetty. Good discussion, I've enjoyed reading this thread! [1] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo-api-x [2] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo-api-x-demo [3] https://ops4j1.jira.com/wiki/x/PwA8Aw [4] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4 On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 3:07 PM, CodeCola <prasen...@rogers.com> wrote: > Not a question but a request for comments. With a focus on Java. > > Container technology has traditionally been messy with dependencies and no > easy failsafe way until Docker came along to really pack ALL dependencies > (including the JVM) together in one ready-to-ship image that was faster, > more comfortable, and easier to understand than other container and code > shipping methods out there. The spectrum from (Classical) Java EE > Containers > (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty) --> Java Application Servers that are containerized > (Karaf, Wildfly, etc), Application Delivery Containers (Docker) and > Virtualization (VMWare, Hyper-V) etc. offers a different level of isolation > with different goals (abstraction, isolation and delivery). > > What are the choices, how should they play together, should they be used in > conjunction with each other as they offer different kinds of > Containerization? > > <http://karaf.922171.n3.nabble.com/file/n4049162/ > Levels_of_Containerization.png> > > > > -- > View this message in context: http://karaf.922171.n3.nabble.com/Levels-of- > Containerization-focus-on-Docker-and-Karaf-tp4049162.html > Sent from the Karaf - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. >
