Skip to main content

My-Cloud-IDE - a SaaS built using Docker

I always wanted to know about how services like Codenvy and Heroku internally worked. The only way to understand that was to build a similar project.

The main component of this project is Docker.

Docker

 Docker is a software that performs OS-level virtualisation and is developed for Linux. More information about it can be found here.


About My-Cloud-IDE:

My-Cloud-IDE is a proof-of-concept for a Software as a Service (SaaS). It can be used to perform software development on cloud without worrying about resolving software dependencies, software installations etc. The user gets a fully functional IDE in his/her browser after registration. Each user has his/her own isolated software environment because My-Cloud-IDE uses Docker to perform OS-level virtualisation in the backend.


Technical Details

I divided the project into two modules. One module was for 'management' purpose. This includes user interfaces, user management and preparing some files that are to be loaded into the docker container when the time comes. More features like analytics can be added later on.

Another module was for controlling the Docker. This module takes care of instructing the Docker to start/stop containers, mount volumes into the container and 'port binding' between host and the container.

The 'management' module was written in PHP and for storing user information, I used a simple JSON file and didn't wanted to use a heavy RDBMS. The reason for using PHP was because I integrated an open source web IDE called Codiad (which was written in PHP) in this project. Another reason was because I have worked on PHP projects a lot and I am very comfortable with it. I made a lot of modifications to the source code of Codiad to make it meet my requirements.

The 'docker-controller' module was written in Java. The reason behind the choice of the language was that there is a very easy-to-use docker client library (here) which is written in Java.




How did PHP and Java communicate with each other?
I wanted the PHP module to act as a server to the users for signups and logins, and the Java module to act as a server to the PHP module to do all the Docker operations.

The PHP module was running on a standard port 80 (with Apache web server). I wanted to create another small web server on a different port for Java module so that PHP and Java can communicate with each other.

I started a small server (using this Java library) on port 8080. Now, to send and receive HTTP requests from PHP to the Java server (running on port 8080), I used php-curl module. In this way, when the user of My-Cloud-IDE performs a login or a signup, PHP module (management module) will instruct the Java module (docker controller) to create a new Docker container.

To know more, check out the Github repo here!

This is just a proof of concept.


Screenshots: (Click on the images to view them in full screen)









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How did I setup a Rasberry Pi 3 without any peripherals

I am an absolute beginner in this Raspberry Pi (I'll be using "RPi" for short) world and this post shows how I started up the RPi without using external keyboard or mouse (for RPi) and still managed to get a graphical desktop environment of Raspbian on my Debian workstation (and controlled my RPi remotely). Step 1: I downloaded 'Raspbian Stretch with Desktop' ( here ). I got a ZIP file. I unzipped it and ended up with a .img which was roughly 4.6 GB. Step 2: Now, to create a bootable media (a memory card perhaps) by copying the .img file onto it, I used dd command. sudo dd if=<path to img> of=/dev/<sdb,sdc..> Be particularly careful with using dd command. You can mess up a lot of things. Using dd command on your memory card will wipe out all contents in it. Using dd command on your hard disk, umm.. not a good idea. To know the disk path of your memory card, use sudo fdisk -l  (el in small caps) . Your hard disk will probably be /dev/sda. You...

Privacy Concerns in Android

Introduction       Android has a robust Access control system. If an Android app needs to use resources or information outside of its own scope, the app has to request the appropriate permission . It needs to get permissions before accessing critical resources like Camera, Location, Contacts etc. On Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher, the app needs to request these permissions at runtime by showing a dialog box to the user. Also, the user will have an option to revoke these permissions for that app at any time in future.       But, in this article, I would like to point out a few resources that an app can access without any permission s and this might raise a serious privacy concern for the user. Privacy Concerns An app can fetch a list of all other apps installed on your phone. An app doesn't need to request any permissions from you to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone. For example, a Netflix app can get to know wh...