[Discuss] docker Re: Corralling Processes on Linux

[Rich Braun]

Kent Borg <kentborg at borg.org> wrote:
>> I am playing with lots of different processes
>> communicating with each other, maybe some coming and going
>> incrementally. I want the ability occasionally kill them all and
>> start from a clean slate.

Sure sounds like what you really want is Docker and/or Kubernetes. Cgroups is
part of the mechanism used by containers (such as the original LXC) to isolate
process groups but there's a whole open-source infrastructure that provide the
tools that abstract out a lot of the difficult parts of what you want to do.

Plain old docker engine is pretty easy to learn. Docker swarm isn't a lot
harder. Kubernetes is harder to learn but has become a de facto standard for
large-scale data center operation (simply because it's what Google uses to run
its data centers, and the herd of IT admins has followed them to build
private-cloud infra now that OpenStack's lost momentum).

Why do I mention Kubernetes? It's built on top of the easy-to-learn Docker
Engine which provides resource abstractions that include volume mounts,
network attachments, an image-build procedure (Dockerfile) that just uses a
shell script to define your content, and an image-run/stop command line
interface. It sits on top of cgroups and a few other Linux-internal features,
and makes the things you want to do really easy.

If you don't yet know Docker, find a tutorial like this one and play with it
locally: https://docker-curriculum.com/ If you have an old distro and don't
want to go through the installation steps, you can even learn docker online
with a pretty-cool split-screen live interactive tutorial:
https://labs.play-with-docker.com/

-rich