⚡Docker Production Simulation | Scaling Flask + Postgres with Nginx & Monitoring

DevOps Labs — Debugging & Scaling Like Real Production Engineers

🎯 Why This Simulation Matters
Running a single Flask app in Docker is easy.
But in production, things get messy:

  • Multiple services (Flask + Postgres)

  • Load balancing (Nginx)

  • Monitoring (so you know what’s breaking before users complain)

Without these pieces, your Docker setup will fail under real-world load.
This episode simulates a mini production environment where we’ll break, scale, and debug — just like engineers do at work.

▶️ What You’ll Learn in This Video
Hands-on demo: https://youtu.be/nWiy6eaS5FU

📌 Architecture Setup

  • Flask app container

  • Postgres database container

  • Nginx as reverse proxy & load balancer

  • Monitoring with cAdvisor & live logs

📌 Simulating Load & Failures

  • Push traffic → watch logs explode

  • Trigger Postgres connection issues

  • Debug Nginx routing errors

  • Nginx automatically balances traffic across all Flask containers

📌 Best Practices

  • Separate containers for app, DB, and proxy

  • Always add monitoring to Docker stacks

  • Test scaling locally before deploying to cloud

👉 Watch the full video here: https://youtu.be/nWiy6eaS5FU
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🛠 Takeaway Example Command
❌ Single container (default):

docker compose up -d

✅ Scale to 3 containers (manual flag):

docker compose up --scale app=3 -d

💡 This gives you instant horizontal scaling without touching Compose files.

💡 Why This Guide Stands Out
🚀 Real-world production simulation → Not just “Docker run”, but multi-service scaling.
🔎 Debug-driven → You’ll see errors in logs, routing, and DB connections.
🏭 Production-ready → By the end, you’ll know how to scale & monitor a mini production stack on your laptop.

This isn’t just Docker theory — it’s a production simulation you’ll actually reproduce.

👋 Final Note
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Every week I share real DevOps outages, interview prep, and hands-on labs you can reproduce — so you’ll never be caught off guard in production.