After having used Vagrant to create Virtual Machines (VMs) ready made for MOOC participants, I’ve been investigating the use of docker for a similar need.
In order to move on, I’ve applied a clever trick by proposing a project to students of ours (3rd year engineering school end-of-classes project of the ASR major).
The project was addressing several needs :
- a functional need: being able to monitor what happens inside the VMs run on the participant’s side, so that MOOC labs aren’t performed in a black box;
- a non functional need: investigate the potential benefits of docker, compared to Vagrant.
The students (François Monniot and Alexis Mousset) have worked very well, and we have a few apps in the result, that allow us to assemble a POC in order to complete our evaluation.
In following posts, I will describe some of these components and will present some ideas and maybe results on the technology’s potential. The impatient reader may directly browse their code on GitHub, starting from the dedicated site.