Portainer VS Docker Compose

I'd say that going from Docker Compose to Docker Swarm is the first logical step, because it's included in a Docker install and also uses the same Compose format (with more parameters, such as deployment constraints, like which node hostname or tag you want a certain container to be scheduled on): https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v3... That said, you won't see lots of Docker Swarm professionally anymore - it's just the way the job market is, despite it being completely sufficient for many smaller projects out there, I'm running it in prod successfully so far and it's great.

Another reasonably lightweight alternative would be Hashicorp Nomad, because it's free, simple to deploy and their HCL format isn't too bad either, as long as you keep things simple, in addition to them supporting more than just container workloads: https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad That said, if you don't buy into HashiStack too much, then there won't be too much benefit from learning HCL and translating the contents of various example docker-compose.yml files that you see in a variety of repos out there, although their other tools are nice - for example, Consul (a service mesh). This is a nice but also a bit niche option.

Lastly, there is Kubernetes. It's complicated, even more so when you get into solutions like Istio, typically eats up lots of resources, can be difficult to manage and debug, but does pretty much anything that you might need, as long as you have either enough people to administer it, or a wallet that's thick enough for you to pay one of the cloud vendors to do it for you. Personally, I'd look into the lightweight clusters at first, like k0s, MicroK8s, or perhaps the K3s project in particular: https://k3s.io/

I'd also suggest that if you get this far, don't be afraid to look into options for dashboards and web based UIs to make exploring things easier:

  - for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes there is Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

Portainer - Makes managing my homelab, gateway and (Pi0) DNS server extremely easy and fun. Traefik - Great companion for the above. For those who don't know for some reason - a simple, yet extremely powerful reverse proxy. Docker - Should be obvious, but I would feel bad if I didn't give it a shoutout. If you haven't heard of it - go and learn, please, it'll make your life beautiful.

Portainer - Web UI for managing Docker Containers

> Why there are needs to use docker GUIs?

Because to some people using GUIs are more approachable and in some case objectively better (e.g. telling the state of things at a glance and efficiently using screen real estate, with graphs and whatnot), whereas the ways they're worse in might not dealbreakers (e.g. lack of automation, given that there can still be APIs or access to the underlying cluster anyways).

For an example of this, see pieces of software that one can use to manage orchestrators:

- Portainer: https://www.portainer.io/

- Rancher: https://www.rancher.com/products/rancher

Some orchestrators even include dashboards on their own:

- Kubernetes dashboard: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/access-application-cluster/...

- Nomad web UI: https://developer.hashicorp.com/nomad/tutorials/web-ui

And some of that applies to running regular containers and managing them locally: for many it can be useful to be able to just click around to discover more details about a container, as well as what's using storage and so on. Thankfully the CLIs of Docker and competing runtimes are pretty well structured as they are, but I guess it's just a different type of UX.

At the end of the day, what works for you, or even what you find comfortable to use, might not be the case for someone else and vice versa. It's definitely nice to have that choice in the first place, and to know the various options out there.

- Portainer

Breaking it down a bit more: - 'handle_path /docker/' means to handle on calls to http://example.tailnet-def456.ts.net/docker/ - 'reverse_proxy / portainer:9000' means to reverse proxy those calls to "portainer" (that's the container name on the docker network) on port 9000. That's where I have hosted my docker manager (https://www.portainer.io/)

From purely an administration standpoint, I'd recommend Cockpit. For Docker, I'd also recommend Portainer. Maybe for Minecraft, try out Pterodactyl - I personally haven't used it myself but I've heard good things about it.

Portainer - Web UI for managing Docker Containers

Congratulation!!! You have successfully deployed a containerized web application using Docker Compose.

~$ mkdir -p ~/.docker/cli-plugins/ ~$ curl -SL https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/v2.15.1/docker-compose-linux-x86_64 -o ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose ~$ chmod +x ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose

Then, we’ll use Docker-Compose to easily deploy our code.

Now here's the "gotcha"... you don't need to write Kubernetes manifest files to deploy your app. Instead, you will need to create another type of manifest file named Acornfile. This file is written in JSON-like syntax, feels very similar to a Docker Compose or Helm, and is used to package your application as an Acorn app.

> Docker compose is a dead end AFAIK ..

What? I'm not involved and don't follow closely but pretty sure it's about as dead as docker itself. I.e. not dead. There was commits 8hrs ago -- https://github.com/docker/compose/. Not sure who did that if not "the community".

I am assuming you have purely used the Synology docker GUI. If you're just learning to play around with docker that is perfectly fine but to play around more with containers I recommend getting to know docker-compose it's pre-installed and you have a lot more control. Some light reading.

Again, blame Docker. It expects parameters in a specific format, so we ask for them in that same format. It may be worth looking at compose files and how they work as they will give you more of a configuration file esque setup which might suit your desire to edit running deployments (with compose you can redeploy your modified config, including networks, and the changes will be applied).

Use jaeger for tracing and elasticsearch for storage, and start both services locally using docker-compose.

With the Dockerfile completed, you can go on to the next step of orchestrating the image using Docker compose.

https://docs.docker.com/compose/ -- an overview of Compose.