Why? As part of our cost reduction at Cisco Cloud Security, we are always expected to find ways to reduce our expenses from the obvious reasons. Circumstances We normally use CloudWatch metrics to increase and decrease the number of running containers. This is fine as long as the load distribution over time is unpredictable, and the peaks are long enough to actually make use of the new allocated resources. The problem Short predictable loads over API endpoints, cause more c

Setting the stage: organisational circumstances Early stage: We started as a 2 person development team working on 2 containerised services. While we were concerned about scale, we weren't concerned about scaling the team itself, so we built our services using simple makefiles, not considering the future cost. Growth: After few months we found ourselves working with ~20 developers from 3 different teams, across several countries, all on the same project. We have 25 containeris

Design pattern for lean docker images and fast develop / build iterations Problems to be solved Long build time Long upload to registry Ways solving the problems Avoid installing dependencies on high frequency builds (i.e install dependencies on base image) Reduce image size by using small base image, install dependencies for compile time and runtime, remove all compile time dependencies when build finished Schematics Explanation Base layer Depending on what we are trying to