At PuppetConf, I had the pleasure of meeting Bren Briggs, who I knew from twitter and IRC, so I was pretty happy when he asked me if I wanted to work on a Minecraft module with him. Of course we’re busy with life and work and the holidays, so we haven’t started yet, but we’re going to try soon!
Bren floated some ideas past me and one of the big questions was, do we want to deploy the Minecraft instance as if we’re on bare metal or via Docker? He started a twitter poll, but those things only last 24 hours and we only received 3 votes. If you were going to use a Minecraft module, would you want one that uses Docker or one that does not?
I’m a little biased here, but I hope people want to see Docker. I’ve not used Docker in anger before, and I need more motivation to update my kickstart setup from EL6 to EL7. But don’t let me sway you, let us know what YOU would like to see. Thanks!
rnelson0 
I’d vote for Docker, that way I’m learning how to do something that would be more generally useful, as WELL as minecraft
Honestly I’d like to see some information about Project Photon, seeing as it’s in the process of being open sourced.
That is a little over my head for the moment, but I can add it to the list for the future! Maybe a 2.0 thing or a project of its own.
I am currently one of the co-owners of the pwn9.com gaming community. We have been running Minecraft servers for over 4 years now. The hosts we use are typically “budget” hosts that provide VPS’s, like Linode and cloudatcost.com.
Docker containers, as light as they are, are still additional overhead. I have just started puppet-ifying many of our things, and I will be doing it without Docker. Our current setup is base OS, MineOS for Minecraft server management, and then each server instance in a subdirectory, running under a unix user account. We tie our servers together with Bungeecord, which runs on a separate host, along with our Web services.
Wow, that’s some awesome and detailed information we can use. Thanks! Are any VPSes that you’ve investigated offering docker capabilities?
None of the hosts we’ve used offer Docker. There are some really big servers in the minecraft community (eg: Mineplex) that use way more resources than we do. We have about 4-5 different gameplay styles on one or two VPS’s, consuming about 16-20GB of RAM. Mineplex probably has at least 30x that number. They also probably have a more custom setup than someone like us. I guess it depends on who your target audience would be for your module. 🙂
We don’t have any revenue for our site, so basically, we are doing things as inexpensively as possible. This is a hobby for the co-owners of pwn9, so we are always looking for the cheapest option that meets the minimum requirements. 🙂 Docker support isn’t even a criteria. 🙂