Despite the hype, deploying and running these containers in the real world is still a challenge. Today’s container frameworks force developers to compensate for many surprisingly restrictive operational constraints. Teams adopt containers only for stateless services, leaving behind many of their advantages in improving operability for the entire stack.
The Autopilot Pattern is a powerful design concept to address these problems. By moving the responsibility for handling events such as startup, shutdown, scaling, and recovery from the framework into the application, we can build intelligent architectures that maximize developer flexibility and minimize the need for human operational intervention. Better still, by giving applications more control over their lifecycle, we can build container platforms that can knit together legacy and greenfield applications alike.
Tim Gross will demonstrate the AutoPilot Pattern by applying it to classic legacy stateful application architectures. He’ll show how replication bootstrapping, automated fail-over, and backups can all be had without custom orchestration by a container framework.