Pasha Sviderski

How to connect Docker containers across multiple hosts with WireGuard | Uncloud Learn how to configure a WireGuard overlay network that lets Docker containers securely communicate across multiple hosts. No exposed ports needed.

Ever wanted your Docker containers running on different hosts to securely talk to each other without exposing ports?

Here's my guide on using pure WireGuard to make this work across clouds and even behind NAT +a sneak peek at Uncloud, the tool I built to automate it all

uncloud.run/blog/connect...

It works. But at first I tried to convert my tailwind-styled page into a regular docusaurus page and it was a nightmare to fight with react and all the automatic docusaurus injections into the page. Don’t try this at home kids

4. After creating a docusaurus build, overwrite the generated /index.html with my landing page. I couldn’t put it into docusaurus static because it caused conflict with the generated index.html 🙈

1. Need to create an empty docusaurus page for root path / (pages/index.js)
2. Set navbar.logo.href to fqdn
3. Swizzle the DocBreadcrumbs component and overwrite baseUrl (/ → /docs) so that home leads to the root of docs instead of the empty page

Managed to deploy docusaurus-generated docs and a landing page (static html with tailwind css) as one bundle of static html such that:

/ → standalone landing page html
/docs and /blog → html generated from markdown

Finding the right incantation was non-trivial 👇

Uncloud looks super promising in this space. The power of docker without the overhead of k8s

> no central control plane to maintain. Each machine maintains a synchronised copy of the cluster state through peer-to-peer communication

🆒

uncloud.run

services:
app:
x-ports:
- example.com:8000/https

Docker Compose spec allows extending it with arbitrary fields prefixed with ‘x-’. People use this to define common blocks e.g. env vars and reuse them with yaml anchors.

Uncloud extends the service spec with ‘x-ports’ to publish container ports as http(s) via the reverse proxy 👇

Had a chat with a guy who still runs Rancher 1.6 at their company. FYI it was killed >5 years ago.
They’re looking for alternatives which are not k8s but are not happy with any, and uncloud isn't quite there yet.

While basic operations are standardised, terminal feature sets still differ:

- 256 colours or true colour
- unicode and hyperlinks handling
- mouse support
- image display

Cases like SSH sessions, tmux, zellij sometimes need special handling as well.

It's much less critical today as we don't use physical terminals anymore. They have been replaced with terminal emulators (ghostty or iterm2) which converged on common standards like vt100/xterm.

TIL about terminfo, a technology from the 80s. It's a database at /usr/share/terminfo that tells TUI programs how to control different terminals. Like how to clear the screen, print colors, or what capabilities are supported. Programs access this info using libraries such as ncurses or tcell.

Appreciate the kind words! ❤️ Keeping things simple and familiar while adding the missing pieces like multi-machine rollouts is the way to go

GitHub - psviderski/uncloud: A lightweight tool for deploying and managing containerised applications across a network of Docker hosts. Bridging the gap between Docker and Kubernetes ✨ A lightweight tool for deploying and managing containerised applications across a network of Docker hosts. Bridging the gap between Docker and Kubernetes ✨ - psviderski/uncloud

This looks sick. github.com/psviderski/u... - habitat had many similar design goals. I love that the swing here is "just docker". Great work!

Woke up to find out my friend x.com/megaserg
is sponsoring me on github! Thank you for believing in my work mate! ❤️

Most of the time, I try to find workarounds or fixes on my own by reading the code to avoid bothering other people. But I think I'm changing. There are so many smart people willing to help out there and I really enjoy talking to them.

I'm so grateful to people who take their time to create issues on GitHub reporting bugs or asking about features. I rarely do this myself unless it's really critical for my use case.

This is huge - I've got my very first open source sponsorship! 🥹 Thank you github.com/reorx for believing in Uncloud, this means the world to me! 🙏
Let's make the dreams come true!

All I want is a Renaissance of the unbloated focused Docker tooling we were building before k8s shut it down and replaced with tasteless enterprise monsters.

Emerging from a dark age of complexity into enlightenment 😅

That's what I'm dreaming of delivering with Uncloud. I'm betting on something maintainable and easily recoverable instead of chasing self-healing distributed systems.

- for stateless containers, we need replicated deployments with rollbacks
- for DBs and other stateful containers, we need persistent volumes with instant snapshots and quick backup/restore to other servers/external storage/S3. For critical cases, streaming replication (I’m looking at you ZFS)

You should be able to easily migrate or scale such apps when you need to replace or upgrade servers or quickly restore from backup if they fail badly. Still maintaining three or four 9s if done right.

There's a massive class of web apps that just need a database and a bunch of containers scattered across a few servers.

I strongly believe Uncloud should exist in some form to have a decent alternative when k8s is too much for you. I'm going to keep exploring what that looks like and make it fun to use.

5 days later:
unregistry: 0 → 2.5K🌟
uncloud: 350 → 1.1K🌟
twitter: +600 followers

This is crazy! I’ve received incredibly motivating messages. Thank you so much to everyone. You have no idea how much this means to me. I've felt like an imposter almost every day but now a bit less so.

I’m not giving up. I'm doubling down.

I set a goal for Uncloud to hit 1K🌟 this year and finally get some visibility — or perhaps give up otherwise. Last week my friend and I released unregistry (a tiny subproject) and it hit the front page of the orange site.

GitHub - psviderski/unregistry: Push docker images directly to remote servers without an external registry Push docker images directly to remote servers without an external registry - psviderski/unregistry

"psviderski/unregistry: Push docker images directly to remote servers without an external registry" github.com/psviderski/u...