Failover System Configuration Consistency

“Rebuilding My Personal Infrastructure With Alpine Linux and Docker He&#x27;s taken the first level step of containerization. What he gets is a deterministic way to build his environment.<p>You could just install the services and handle the configuration files, but then you suffer from replicability and deterministic build problems:<p>- The configuration files are all over the place, and while you can remember most of them, you can&#x27;t be 100% sure that you got everything in &#x2F;var&#x2F;lib&#x2F;blahblah&#x2F;.config&#x2F;something.conf, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;defaults&#x2F;blahblah, &#x2F;etc&#x2F;someotherthingd&#x2F;blahblah.conf, etc.<p>- Rebuilding the server becomes a problem because you don&#x27;t remember a year and a half later everything you did to set the damn thing up. Even worse, you&#x27;ve been tweaking your config over time, installing other packages that you can&#x27;t remember, putting in custom scripts for various things...<p>- Recovering from a catastrophic failure is even worse, because now you don&#x27;t even have the old configuration to puzzle through.<p>- If you set up another failover system, you can&#x27;t be sure it&#x27;s configured 100% the same as the old one. And even if you did get them 100% the same, they WILL drift over time as you forget to migrate changes from one to the other.<p>You can mitigate this by using ansible or chef or docker or the like.<p>The other handy thing with container tech is that you can tear down and rebuild without having to wipe your hard drive and spend 30 minutes reinstalling the OS from the iso. Iterating your builds until you have the perfect setup becomes a lot more appealing when your turnaround time is 2-5 minutes.<p>Damage control becomes a lot easier. A bug in one program doesn&#x27;t damage something in another container.<p>After this level, you can move up to the orchestration layer, where each container is just a component, and you tell your orchestration layer to &quot;launch two of these with failover and the following address, link them to instances of postgresql, do an nginx frontend with this cache and config, pointing to this NAS for data&quot;, and it just works.<p>It&#x27;s a lot like programming languages. You COULD do it all in assembly, but C is nicer. You COULD do it all in C, but for most people, a gc functional language with lambdas and coroutines etc gives you the sweet spot between cognitive load and performance.<p>With a shared language for doing these powerful things, you now gain the ability to easily share with others (like docker hub), increasing everyone&#x27;s power exponentially. Yes, you need to vet whose components you are using, but that&#x27;s far less work than building the world yourself.<p>Yes, there&#x27;s a learning curve, but the payoff over time from the resulting power of expression is huge.”