It has been a while as I have been busy writing, I thought I would spend some of my freetime having a very quick play with Ansible AWX↗ , which is the Open Source version of Ansible Tower↗ . I created the following Vagrantfile to launch a CentOS 7↗ server; Ansible AWX 1/3 # -*- mode: ruby -*- # vi: set ft=ruby : VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION = "2" Vagrant.configure(VAGRANTFILE_API_VERSION) do |config| config.vm.box = "centos/7" config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |v| v.memory = 4048 v.cpus = 2 v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--natdnshostresolver1", "on"] v.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--ioapic", "on"] end config.vm.define "awx" do |awx| awx.vm.hostname = "awx.local" awx.vm.network :forwarded_port, guest: "80", host: "8080" awx.vm.provision :ansible do |ansible| ansible.playbook = "playbook.yml" ansible.become = true end end end This launches the following playbook.yml which prepares the CentOS 7 box by installing Docker and the other prerequisites need to build and launch AWX; ...

It has been a while since I have posted, since Docker Bootcamp was published I have been hard at work on the second edition of Mastering Docker for Packt↗ which is now available from https://www.packtpub.com/en-us/product/mastering-docker-9781789618686↗ as well as Amazon and all other book stores.

I haven’t posted here in a while as I have been busy writting my third book. I am pleased to say that Docker Bootcamp will be published in the next few weeks by Packt↗ . It is available for pre-order now↗ .

I had some time today, so I thought I would combine two posts I have been planning on writing for a week or two, looking at Docker 1.13 and also Minio. It is important to note before you read further that this post does not cover using Mino as a storage backend for containers. It is about launching a distributed Minio installation in a Docker Swarm cluster and consuming the storage using the Minio command line client and web interface. ...

Following on from the post I wrote on Portainer; Portainer, a UI for Docker↗ There was a lot of great feedback, like the following from Aleksandr Blekh, Ph.D.↗ ; Great post, thank you! Could you briefly clarify why/when one would want to prefer Portainer to Rancher and vice versa. It would be great, if you could also touch on benefits of using Docker UIs versus Kubernetes-based PaaS, specifically OpenShift (which has UI for Docker container management). ...

Its been quite a while since I wrote up what I am using on day to day, in fact I seem to have skipped all of 2016. Desktop Apps Not too much change on the Desktop … Visual Studio Code↗ ; I started off the year Atom, but this gives me the same functionality and seems quicker Pastebot↗ ; Working in tech means I copy and paste alot, this lets me sync and (not all from StackOverflow↗ ) Bear↗ ; For note taking … still using SublimeText↗ (Still the best text editor around), 1Password↗ , Photoshop↗ , Omnigraffle↗ , Tweetbot↗ & MS Office↗ . ...

I thought it was about time, as I had some to spare today, to have a play with one of the new feature of the Elastic family of products I have yet to try. Beats is the platform for single-purpose data shippers. They install as lightweight agents and send data from hundreds or thousands of machines to Logstash or Elasticsearch. I have used an ELK stack before↗ but never for metrics, it always been for more traditional log files and tools such as Zabbix↗ have been my goto for metrics. ...

I have more and more people at work asking me about Docker and Kubernetes↗ , so I thought it would be good to write down some instructions on bringing up a small test lab on my laptop. I had initially assumed that I would have to spend some time configuring a Vagrant box for this, but then I spotted the Minikube project↗ . Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your laptop for users looking to try out Kubernetes or develop with it day-to-day. ...