What Should I Learn About Next?

As you no doubt are aware, our learning never ends. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. C’est la vie.

To help in this effort, a brief summary of each valuable area will be provided, and then it’s up to you to do a bit of digging to learn more and think about how to apply these to your application.

Some areas will be more appealing and useful than others in your situation, so dig deeper into the areas you need, and feel free to leave what you don’t. Enjoy!

Limiting resources

As you run more containers in your cluster, you may find the need to constrain the CPU resources and memory given to certain containers. Both Swarm and Kubernetes provide a way to specify limits on the resources a container is allowed. Here’s an example with Swarm that means containers for some service will only receive a maximum of 50 MB of memory, and one tenth of a single CPU core.

services:
  some-service:
	deploy:
	  resources:
		limits:
		  cpus: "0.1"
		  memory: 50M

Autoscaling

What’s better than running a command to scale up a service? Running no commands to scale up a service. This is known as autoscaling. It involves monitoring key usage and load metrics for containers and detecting when they get close to becoming overloaded. At this point, the new containers for the service are launched to meet ...