Mon bloc-notes

This article is the first one of a series about project management in the field of Internet of Things. Every article, using a real-life project as an example, will exhibit a salient feedback from experience in managing such types of projects.

A first distinctive feature of IoT projects is that they require integration of technical blocks originating from three different domains: electronics, communications and software. And inside these three domains, various different subdomains are usually involved: analog and digital electronics, wireless communication modules, protocol stacks, embedded software, user interfaces, database management, analytics, geospatial data, etc.

Recently, I decided to overhaul the email server I had been running for several years now. I had two main requirements in mind:

• isolate the installation in such a way that I can easily move it from one machine to another one, when I need it (for instance, when my hosting service provider delivers a new, less expensive service)
• use ISPConfig

For isolation, using Docker would have been a nice solution for me, as I already have moved most of the services I run on my server to Docker containers. But the "standard" paradigm for docker is one process per container. I do not like to use tools for something else than what there have been designed for (do you know the quotation: "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" ? ). Of course, I could try to use Supervisor, or re-use one of the existing dockerizations of ISPConfig. But the first solution would require me to spend time in understanding how ISPConfig works. And, for the second solution, I'm not sure about the quality of existing containers.