Whether you’re new to development or a seasoned developer, containers have proven to be game-changing in building, testing, and deploying applications. This article is meant as a quick introduction to the world of containers. To get started, you’ll need to install Docker to follow along with the examples. If you haven’t installed Docker yet, head over to their website to get it installed. There are free versions available for all major operating systems.
With the release of the WordPress REST API (version 4.7 circa 2016), WordPress developers started deploying the application as a headless CMS. As the WordPress community started to embrace this architecture, more and more developers are starting to use it in production. Now thanks to the growing number of plugins, WordPress as a headless CMS is starting to become the go-to deployment strategy.
The recent public release of Cycle’s API has already seen all sorts of innovative uses, from automating the deployments of medical applications, to creating customized monitoring services to track specific performance metrics. Everything you can do in the portal can also be accomplished via the API — it’s actually the exact same API we used to build the portal!
Cycle’s API docs are live, and with it a whole new suite of tools to automate the management of containers across cloud providers. This is the same API that Cycle’s portal is built upon, meaning you have near full capability to do anything programmatically that you can do through the interface.
Cycle aims to give you maximum flexibility with how you architect your application. By marking a container as ‘stateful’, you’re declaring that the container and its instances should be treated more like pets than cattle, but more on that analogy below. The need to maintain state should never be a deciding factor when considering whether or not to containerize as containers are simply portable code packages.
Updating information held on container volumes, debugging a running instance, backing up files locally, or just making sure everything is where you expect it to be… remote access is an integral part of any system.
