Docker (LXC) Enabled Images In SoftLayer

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Anyone that's worked with me in the past 6-9 months knows that docker and Linux Containers (LXC) are near and dear to my heart. I firmly believe these technologies are poised to change our modern Cloud era and in fact I'd assert we're already beginning to see that change solidify now. There are numerous public resources which discuss the benefits of LXC as a "virtualization technology", but let's quickly recap some of those before going further. In particular let's focus on LXC from a docker perspective.

Giving Your SoftLayer Servers A Personality With Provisioning Scripts

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Personalities no longer only apply to people (and some would argue animals); this terminology has found its way into the Cloud / virtualization space as well. In the Cloud / virtualization space the term personality refers to the act of tweaking or configuring a vanilla server instance (typically via a bootstrapping or automated process) for a particular purpose; the resulting "tweaked" server is said to have a personality. For example, let's say you take a vanilla Ubuntu Virtual Machine (VM), install the eclipse IDE, pydev and a handful of python modules resulting in VM specifically tailored for python development. That VM can be said to have a "python dev" personality.

SoftLayer makes server personalities easy and convenient by means of "provisioning scripts". Not only are provisioning scripts a snap to use, but they also provide a consistent way to bootstrap any SoftLayer server type and image making them a very effective tool in the SoftLayer infrastructure.