Simuliidae is a project of Blackfly Solutions, created in October 2018. We use the project as a basis for our managed hosting services. The goal of the project is to share tools and code for "open source" hosting of Drupal, CiviCRM and Wordpress, using Docker and containers.
Origin
In the summer of 2016, I had been providing managed hosting for Drupal and CiviCRM for about 10 years, on dedicated servers. My service used a "shared hosting" model that kept both machine and administrative costs low, at the cost of flexibility, scalability and security. While exploring new options for my next generation of configurations, I concluded that "linux containers" was the right technology for better flexibility, scalability and security, while keeping machine costs reasonable and providing a toolkit that looked promising for automation that would keep administrative costs low as well.
At the time, I came across Docker as a popular tool for implementing containers that had a growing community around it. I was particularly impressed with the "microservices" model and how the "dockerfile" file format is used for describing how those containers are connected to each other.
Evolution
Over the years, I've written lots of blog posts describing how the project has evolved, here:
- Should I care about Docker?
- Hosting CiviCRM with Docker and Containers: Let's Share!
- Simuliidae: an open-source design for hosting with containers
And also here, in some more technical detail:
- My Journey into Containers
- Docker: Putting things together and pulling them apart
- Building and maintaining Drupal + CiviCRM application containers
- Orchestrating Drupal + CiviCRM containers into a working site: describing the challenge
- Welcome to Simuliidae v2
The first production install was in 2017, for the Law department of the University of Toronto.
Using Simuliidae
Like all tools, it can be used in multiple ways, and I expect some that I can't imagine yet.
The three primary intended use cases are:
- "Boutique" hosting services
- Staging and development site copies
- Testing
"Testing" is intended fairly broadly, e.g a service like Simply Test, or the use of these images for running automated testing.
Code, Help and Support
The project code is hosted here on github, with thanks for free hosting of public open source projects.
Images are built semi-regularly and hosted on docker hub, with thanks to Docker for sponsoring it as an open source project.
Issues can be posted to the github issue queue.
Additional questions can be directed to the contact form on this site.