Blocks in containers: Lessons learned from containerizing Minecraft

Its clear containers are here to stay for building reliable, scalable applications. But what about applications developed prior to the advent of containerization? Using Minecraft as her example, Julia Ferraioli explains why retrofitting technology for containers poses conceptual and practical challenges that require an approach different than starting container native.

It’s clear containers are here to stay for building reliable, scalable applications. When starting from scratch, the obvious choice is to build for containerization at the outset, but what about applications developed prior to the advent of containerization? Most of us face the challenge of how (and if!) to containerize existing production applications without committing to completely rearchitecting. Using Minecraft as her example, Julia Ferraioli explains why retrofitting technology for containers poses conceptual and practical challenges that require an approach different than starting container native. While a fun way to pass time, Minecraft is simply a Java application that wasn’t built with containerization in mind. As such, it’s a great example to explore the basics of Docker containers, find and handle the pitfalls that occur, and iteratively embrace container features in a manageable way. Julia then demonstrates how to use Kubernetes, an open source orchestration framework, to handle the scheduling and health of our Minecraft server. Topics include: