Contain yourself

It's becoming clear that companies such as Joyent (original corporate steward of NodeJS), and NodeSource (whose "NodeJS as a Service" is their core competency), and even behemoths such as Google (whose interest in NodeJS may seem peripheral but also seems to be gaining ground in their app hosting platforms), are galvanizing towards containers, and container instrumentation and scheduling, in their offerings.

In San Francisco, Day Zero of NodeSummit 2016 saw NodeSource touting a Docker + Kubernetes + NSolid approach, with a technically substantive working session led by Will Blankenship (NodeSource's Docker "guru") and Nate White (Kubernetes whiz) giving a deep dive into a platform that was later announced as nsolid-kubernetes.

The emphasis on containerization and instrumentation pipelines continued both in days one and two. Tim Gross discussed the Autopilot Pattern as formalized by Joyent, which automates in code the start, stop, and recovery of containerized applications. This specification is realized in Container Pilot, which is compatible with orchestrators Docker Compose, Mesosphere Marathon, and Google Kubernetes.

Clearly there is an established trend toward containerization and container instrumentation in the NodeJS world. All the more need for ops professionals to become fluent in JavaScript and the NodeJS ecosystems, and an opportunity for their developer colleagues to bring their knowledge of this ecosystem to bear in tasks related to deployments, "infrastructure as code", and pipelining.