Discourse on Azure Container Service?

(Paul Martin) #1

Has anyone tried installing Discourse on Azure’s Docker on App Service? From what I have read, Azure is utilizing a specialized Linux distro to support the containers (see 4th heading on Why Docker for Azure? | Docker Documentation ).

I have little Linux experience, and no Docker experience, but I find Azure’s potential to host Docker containers without the need to support the OS to be very attractive!

Thanks!

(Matt Palmer) #2

It’ll be doable, but you’ll still need somewhere to build the container you run on Azure. Running Discourse on a container-hosting system is definitely an advanced level topic.

(Paul Martin) #3

I certainly do expect that I will need some “professional” assistance with this!

I will say - the thing that makes Azure container hosting most attractive is that they abstract the VM, so that we don’t need to manage it.

See: Use a custom Docker image for Web App for Containers - Azure | Microsoft Docs

In the end, I would like to take our Digital Ocean docker image over to Azure.

I am curious if …

  1. Anyone has done this yet.
  2. Would it still be a “supported” configuration
  3. If anyone in the community would be willing to help us with the transition (compensated :slight_smile: )
(Rafael dos Santos Silva) #4

No, that’s not supported.

This setup is possible, and for someone with a lot of experience with Docker even easy.

However, you won’t be able to use any of the easy updates methods, and will be stuck in the current version. To update you need to bootstrap a whole new image, the same process you will need to do the install.

(Paul Martin) #5

well, that is enough to make it no-so-attractive.
Too bad, but thanks for the info. (deliberately not shooting the messenger!)

Not knowing much about the Docker environment, what is that would prevent the normal update process from working?

(Rafael dos Santos Silva) #6

Our upgrade process work on the host OS level (the ./launcher rebuild app) and when we have to update something like Ruby, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, ImageMagick or any of the many dependencies we give you a brand new image.

Also upgrading PostgreSQL would be more complicated in this, unless you use the container for web only, and point PostgreSQL and Redis to the compatible Azure managed services.

But I wouldn’t recommend this for someone who just want a small community up. For that our guide to setup on a $10 Digital Ocean or $5 Vultr server is very good and low maintenance. If your site is bigger than that, you should be able to afford DiscourseHosting or our own hosting. You can even use the Patreon plugin to help fund a big community hosting fees.

(Paul Martin) #7

Thanks for the explanation!

We are using Digital Ocean, and are really very happy with their hosting - the cpst and performance have been great for our low-activity forum.

The only reason we are considering moving on is because we are a MS dev shop, and we leverage their PaaS application hosting, and we would prefer to consolidate onto a single provider.

Based on what you have shared, we will likely stay with Digital Ocean for Discourse.

Thanks again!

(Rafael dos Santos Silva) #8

That said, you can move to one Azure Virtual Machine. I believe the General Purpose A1 instance type should run with a perf very similar to DO.