A Look At Docker

A while ago I worked on a project that used this tech stack

• Akka HTTP : (actually we used Spray.IO but it is practically the same thing for the purpose of this article). For those that don’t know what Akka HTTP is, it is a simple Akka based framework that is also able to expose a REST interface to communicate with the actor system
• Cassandra database : Apache Cassandra is a free and open-source distributed database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassandra offers robust support for clusters spanning multiple datacenters, with asynchronous masterless replication allowing low latency operations for all clients.

It is a multi node cluster

This was a pain to test, and we were always stepping on each others toes, as you can imagine running up a 5 node cluster of VMs just to satisfy my each developers own testing needs was a bit much. So we ended up with some dedicated test environments, running 5 Cassandra nodes. These was still a PITA to be honest.

This got me thinking perhaps I could use Docker to help me out here, perhaps I could run Cassandra in a Docker container, hell perhaps I could even run my own code that uses Cassandra in a Docker container, and just point my UI at the Akka HTTP REST server running in Docker. mmmmm

I started to dig around, and of course this is entirely possible (otherwise I would not be writing this article now would I).

This is certainly not a new thing here for Codeproject, there are numerous Docker articles,  but I never found one that talked about Cassandra, so I thought why not write another one.

 

Which I have just published here : https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1175248/A-look-at-Docker