Docker Up and Running : Failover to a Different Cloud Provider

[Don Horrell]

Hi Sean and Karl.

Sorry there is a second half to that question.
Is it possible to setup a failover system with Docker to a different cloud provider? For example a customer may require that data is kept in their own country, but the availability zones in that country are all clustered close to each other.


Thanks
Don.

[Karl Matthias]

Think of Docker images as portably packaged applications that are easy to run somewhere else. Building a system to do what you ask is possible and the portability of the container image would make it easier than with a traditional application. But you'd still have to do all the hard part yourself. I personally don't believe in multi-cloud as a really useful setup (YMMV). In general most of your investment in a cloud is in building your own tooling to run on it, even if that is just Terraform configs and auth, and using all the best offerings on that provider. If you use more than one, you have more than one set of tools and configs to maintain, and you have to run to the lowest common denominator on both clouds. That means you lose out on the biggest benefit of running on the cloud: all the hosted services that are "built-in" and native to the toolset.

If you need failover, I suggest looking at a single provider and finding a multi-region option you like. That could be a containerized option, and in that case, you get that benefit as well.

[Sean Kane]

I agree with Karl here.

The only thing that I might add is that if you truly need cross-cloud failover, then you should probably investigate whether Kubernetes would be worth adopting. It is not a simple tool, but it is powerful and provides an excellent standardized interface for deploying containers in any environment (cloud or datacenter).