Awesome! I’ve bookmarked this post, and if anybody asks how to run Discourse in Kubernetes or Swarm, I’ll be sure to point them at your images . Advantage of being not-an-employee: my word doesn’t have to carry the weight of being Official™.
They, on the other hand, benefit immensely from having One Official™️ Way of deploying Discourse. CDCK is not going to take on the load of maintaining a deployment system that they themselves don’t use and is massive overkill for most self-hosters. And if they don’t maintain it, they ain’t endorsing it. Brand protection demands it.
I recently reached critical appreciation for discourse and got interested in hosting a deployment. I’m currently hosting JupyterHub, GitLab and Mattermost - everything through Helm charts and would very much like to do the same with Discourse.
Some background about Helm / Kubernetes:
A Helm chart is a set of configurable Kubernetes resources, and Kubernetes resources are for example a Deployment Kubernetes resource that makes a given docker image run at all time. Installing something can end up becoming a single line command + some configuration.
I would be happy to at least review code and make some PRs to fix various things in a Helm chart for discourse if it would be developed. I’m currently a maintainer of JupyterHub’s Helm chart and have various contributions to other charts.
I think it’s actually possible / feasible to break up Discourse into a set of kube pods, but have fun sizing the resource requirements for the web and sidekiq runners
If insane levels of infrastructure failure tolerance is not a business requirement for you, just use the singleton fat container, it’s going to be order of magnitude cheaper & easier for the same level of steady state service.
We are successfully hosting discourse on helm with our own docker image since some months now.
(before we were using our own image as well, with compose)
(but it definitely lack documentation, and “openess” to open accounts and contribute.
If there is demand, here or in pm, we can open )
@pfaffman if you find happy people that are willing to support your time, we’d be happy to collaborate!
We are hosting discourse for some small communities, mainly in France, part of the common movement.
(Like https://forum.chatons.org/ is the biggest one we host pro bono)