Wappler 4 RFC: Servers/Services Manager

Currently managing docker cloud servers (docker machine) and services, is done per target in a popup. It is kind of hidden and a bit cumbersome to use.

We are thinking of creating a whole new panel - Servers/Services Manager - to allows you to manage all your like servers and their services in one place.

On this panel - on the left site, you will be able to create new live servers - project independent, and add docker services to them. Like adding a database server, mail server, some CMS - all docker based. Those servers will be cloud servers based on Docker Machine as it is now in the targets settings.

Then you can also use those server to directly pick from in your project targets indeed, as docker machines as you do now.

This will allow you to manage your live servers much better in one overview, install additional docker services to them, monitoring tools etc.

The current plan was to keep on using Docker Machine to bring easy docker cloud services (VPS) online and install docker on them, as we already have this established. However Docker Machine is currently feature feezed and won’t be development any longer. Also as some of you might have discovered it is hard to keep a backup of al your docker machines.

There are new developments on the services deploy area and offer more flexible solutions like Terraform . Many of the cloud hosting providers already have extensive support for it.

However Terraform is way more broader and has much more functionality in it - as it is not only for docker servers but way much more. That makes it also a bit more complex to use.

So which direction do you think we should take? Maybe we should focus more on PaaS - like Heroku, Digital Ocean Apps and Netlify - where you deploy your app instead of servers.

We are just gathering feedback - no promise this will make it in the final Wappler 4 - but we receive positive feedback we will try to add it soon.