The Joy of Deploying Apache Storm on Docker Swarm
Monday, April 25, 2016 at 8:56AM 
This is a guest repost from Baqend Tech on deploying and redeploying an Apache Storm cluster on top of Docker Swarm instead of deploying on VMs. It's an interesting topic because of the experience Wolfram Wingerath called it "a real joy", which is not a phrase you hear often in tech. Curious, I asked what made using containers such a good experience over using VMs? Here's his reply:
Being pretty new to Docker and Docker Swarm, I'm sure there are many good and bad sides I am not aware of, yet. From my point of view, however, the thing that makes deployment (and operation in general) on top of Docker way more fun than on VMs or even on bare metal is that Docker abstracts from heterogeneity and many issues. Once you have Docker running, you can start something like a MongoDB or a Redis server with a single-line statement. If you have a Docker Swarm cluster, you can do the same, but Docker takes care of distributing the thing you just started to some server in your cluster. Docker even takes care of downloading the correct image in case you don't have it on your machine right now. You also don't have to fight as much with connectivity issues, because every machine can reach every other machine as long as they are in the same Docker network. As demonstrated in the tutorial, this even goes for distributed setups, as long as you have an _overlay_ network.
When I wrote the lines you were quoting in your email, I had a situation in the back of my head that had occurred a few months back when I had to set up and operate an Apache Storm cluster with 16+ nodes. There were several issues such as my inexperience with AWS (coming from OpenStack) and strange connectivity problems relating to Netty (used by Storm) and AWS hostname resolution that had not occurred in my OpenStack setup and eventually cost us several days and several hundred bucks to fix. I really think that you can shield from problems like that by using Docker, simply because your environment remains the same: Docker.
