NetBay journal

Containers & Orchestration

12 practical Containers & Orchestration articles from Netbay Engineering — written for operators running Linux and Windows VPS in India.

12 articles in this topic

Use sidecar containers for log forwarding and certificate renewal on a single VPS without adding cluster complexity or vendor lock-in.

Shrink container images with multi-stage builds, the empty scratch base, and distroless runtimes — smaller pulls, fewer CVEs, faster starts.

Go past a single healthcheck: layered probes, readiness vs liveness, and systemd watchdogs for containers that repair themselves.

Run several containerized services on one VPS with Compose, Podman Quadlets, and a reverse proxy — no cluster, no wasted capacity.

Deploy updates to a Swarm service with zero downtime using order start-first, health checks, health thresholds, and automatic rollback.

Demystify containers by looking at the three real building blocks — cgroups for limits, namespaces for isolation, and the OCI runtime spec.

Open up a container image to see its layers, manifest digest, and config — and learn why filesystem layers are content-addressed.

Run containers without root and manage them with systemd Quadlets — a rootless-first workflow that fits systemd-based VPS hosts cleanly.

Assemble OCI container images with Buildah's rootless, daemonless build steps and combine them with systemd or CI for reproducible pipelines.

Take a docker-compose.yml from the laptop to a hardened production host with TLS, restart policies, and rate limiting behind Caddy or Nginx.

Understand what a container registry is and compare Docker Hub against GitHub Container Registry for hosting public and private images.

Compare Docker Swarm and Kubernetes for a few dozen containers on just a handful of nodes, and learn where Swarm's simplicity genuinely pays off.