Multiplayer Minecraft in Moments- A Docker Container Project

As an emerging configuration management technology, Containers have garnered  a lot of attention.The strength of Containers lies in their scalability and portability as isolated application environments. Due to Docker’s status as free Open-Source software use-cases are constantly popping up for these “Diet-VMs”. For instance, one can use containers to automate the setup of a Minecraft server for multiplayer gaming. Harnessing containers’ portability and configuration-as-code allows us quick, repeatable, and less error-prone deployment - valuable for scaling processes up and down. We can also further strengthen their scalability by deploying containers onto the cloud, giving us the ability to update and upgrade the server as our needs develop over time.

Unfortunately a core facet of Docker containers is the idea of “statelessness”- basically it asks that your containers not retain data between instances. Now this might be desirable for some use-cases, such as a calculator application. But by and large this is a huge issue for many applications including our Minecraft server. We want the massive structures built by our players to stick around in case the container hosting our server ever crashes. To prevent such losses, we can mount remote storage onto Docker containers using {code}’s Open-Source project REX-Ray. This consolidates our data, enabling us to free the container from its individual host, and giving us the option to scale the server via the cloud.

Our presentation targets those new to containers as well as those who are already experienced with their use. We will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of Docker containers by framing them in the relatable spheres of Minecraft and Multiplayer Gaming. We would like to add that we have already rehearsed and given this presentation this past summer at  a meetup for Linux LA.

The presentation itself is roughly 30 minutes with any time afterwards allotted for questions as well as audience interaction- we can deploy multiple Minecraft servers on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud for the audience to play on using the project in our demonstration.