Today, every enterprise, either small or big, focuses on getting high software agility and productivity. If you are a developer, then you might have heard of Docker.
The containerization platform has been gaining momentum since its launch and can be a success if implemented well in the DevOps process. It is a platform with which you will be able to develop and deploy applications to the web server using a streamlined process.
Mostly, developers create and test applications on their local machine and deploy them on the server, which sometimes causes a problem.
There might be times that the application you have created runs flawlessly on your local system and seems ready to be deployed in the production environment. But then you get an error, and you have no idea what went wrong and what could be the possible reason for the failure.
This failure may lead to a frustrating environment for the developers, cost them time and effort, create issues among the team, and eventually reduce productivity.
Earlier, this problem was solved using virtual machines that provide an isolated environment where you can run your application in the test environment and check whether you get the desired output or not. Not anymore. Today, we use Docker to solve this problem with less overhead compared to VMs.
Introduction to Docker
Docker is an open-source container-based technology. A Docker container provides an isolated application bundled with its dependencies and libraries, ready to be deployed on different environments.
With Docker, you can create, test, and deploy containerized applications that will run on most systems and provide you the same results irrespective of the underlying system configuration.
Today, many companies are using Docker for maintaining and running web applications. You can consider the Docker web app as a platform that allows you to launch your application from your web browser directly.
With Docker, you can run multiple individual applications on several servers. It allows you to run and deploy your web-based applications to the live servers in an efficient way. It will enable you to make changes and updates to the application and push the changed Docker image to the repository to run the new application anywhere.
How is Docker Containers Different from VMs?
Well, a virtual machine tends to solve the problem in a different way than Docker. A virtual machine is considered to be an instance of a complete operating system. If you are developing an application on the virtual machine instance, you will need the same instance of a virtual machine on any system running that application.
This method was successful and had been widely adopted. But the problem arises when the number of applications increases, and you require the complete virtual machine instance to run a single web application.
It turns out to be an expensive way as it requires resources for every VM instance. But with Docker, this problem is solved by bundling the application within a container that can run on any platform without worrying about the underlying platform. This method will save storage, time, processing power, and complexity.
5 Best Docker Webserver Apps
Before discussing the best Docker web server apps let’s first talk about Docker Hub and its features.
What is Docker Hub?
Docker offers a container registry that allows your team to manage the Docker images, performing vulnerability analysis, and deciding who can access those images with proper control. It is called Docker Hub.
There are many Docker web server applications, available as containerized applications on Docker Hub. It is a public repository service that allows you to find and share container images within the team. It offers you the following services:
- Hosting Docker images.
- Ensuring user authentication.
- Offers automated image builds and workflow tools.
- Allows you to push Docker images to it.
Features of Docker Hub
- Private Repositories: This allows you to push and pull container images.
- Automated Builds: Lets you build container images from GitHub and Bitbucket automatically and push them to Docker Hub.
- User Access: You can manage user access to private repositories.
- Official Images: This allows you to pull and use container images offered by Docker.
- Publisher Images: This lets you pull and use container images offered by external vendors. Certified images come with compatibility with the Docker Enterprise.
- Webhooks: This Lets you trigger actions after a push to a repository that will integrate Docker Hub with other provided services.
So now that we are done with Docker Hub, it’s time to dive into the Docker web server apps. Below is the list of the web server application frameworks for Docker.
1. Ruby on Rails
Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby. Rails ensure quick productivity and are adopted by many developers. It, however, comes with some problems like dependency, version-control and database management, and bloating of the file size.
To solve these problems, Docker limits the dependency scope, isolates one process from the other, and makes sure we use the optimized images. Docker launches the Rails application in temporary and replaceable containers based on images. Some important points to note regarding Ruby on Rails are:
- Docker will encapsulate your Rails application so that it can be deployed on any platform running Docker.
- Docker will simplify the development process even if you are using the Ruby patched version and older MySQL.
- Docker allows you to select a Ruby base image from the repository that comes with all required files to build the application and run it in production.
2. Django
It is a web framework that is used for developing and running Python applications. With Django, there are some common problems caused due to the default setting configuration and difference from the actual production environment.
If you are using SQLite with a lack of DDL constraints, it will fail during production migration even though it worked fine on the local system. Another problem may be due to the existing web server with a reverse proxy in production.
To solve all these problems, you have to configure your test environment box just like a production, which also supports switching between projects. Docker will help you run and deploy your Python applications across various platforms without getting into any of the mentioned problems.
3. Apache ZooKeeper
Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source server that allows you to maintain a highly reliable distributed coordination. ZooKeeper is a centralized service that supports and provides the naming, distributed synchronization, and group services used by distributed applications.
Implementing these services might be time-consuming and take lots of effort as these services make the application difficult to manage. You can run the ZooKeeper server inside a container using the Docker container networking and make it accessible to your application container.
Docker has a ZooKeeper image and runs a container using this image on every master node. Whenever the container runs, it will either create a cluster or connect to the existing cluster.
4. Nginx
Nginx is an open-source reverse proxy server available for HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, and other protocols. This server was introduced to focus on maintaining high concurrency, high-performance, and using low memory.
You can containerize Nginx to reduce the sysadmin overhead. Once containerized, you do not have to maintain the Nginx using the package manager or build it from the source. Docker makes it easy to replace the old Nginx container with the new one whenever a new version is released. You only have to focus on maintaining the config file and content.
5. Apache Tomcat
Tomcat is an open-source application server for Java applications. Whenever you are running and testing the Java deployments using the Tomcat server, you can use the official Docker Tomcat image. It allows you to set up and run the server efficiently. You have to do some workaround to load and access the manager application.
Conclusion
Docker Hub contains images for the most commonly used web servers. Docker helps developers to use the Docker images to implement in the projects directly without installing and getting all the required files for a web server.
Developers can pull the Docker image on the system and can replace them with another image with the latest release for the web server. It makes the process very easy and efficient to handle.