container-agent is a small python agent designed to manage a group of Docker containers according to a YAML manifest.

virtualenv env
env/bin/pip install git+http://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/container-vm-agent.git
env/bin/container-agent <path/to/manifest.yaml>

Container-optimized images including container-agent are available for Google Compute Engine.

You can list available versions using:

gcutil --project=google-containers listimages

You can launch a new instance running container-agent. It will try to read the manifest from google-container-manifest metadata on startup:

gcutil addinstance my-container-vm \
    --image=projects/google-containers/global/images/container-vm-v20140522 \
    --metadata_from_file=google-container-manifest:containers.yaml

Read more about Containers on the Google Cloud Platform

The agent setup the container group defined by the manifest to share:

• Network Namespaces
• Volumes

This creates a runtime environment where:

• Containers can connect to a service running in other containers of the same group using localhost and a fixed port.
• Containers of the same group can't run services on the same ports.
• Containers of the same group can mount shared volumes defined in the manifest.

A simple netcat server.

version: v1beta1
containers:
  - name: simple-echo
    image: google/busybox
    command: ['nc', '-p', '8080', '-l', '-l', '-e', 'echo', 'hello world!']
    ports:
      - name: nc-echo
        hostPort: 8080
        containerPort: 8080

Read the Manifest format specification, and browse examples

• Give early feedback and talk with the community (including the developer team) on the mailing-list
• Ask development and best practices questions on Stack Overflow
• Chat with the community on IRC
• Submit Issues & Feature requests to the GitHub issue tracker
• Fork the repository and start contributing

Apache License, Version 2.0