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....

Part of my daily routine is to go through Reddit, RSS feeds and also wading through the MediaGlasses twitter↗ account where I follow loads of technical people & companies. Over the lat week or so I have seen Portainer mentioned quite a lot, particularly since it has now had over 1M + pulls on the Docker Hub; Looks like Santa left @portainerio a nice christmas gift.. 1 Million @docker Pulls!!! Thank you all for helping us achieve this milestone....

At the start of this month Docker purchased a storage startup called Infinit↗ . We’re joining @docker! 🐳 🎉 https://t.co/iCTBd0bWLw — Infinit (@infinit) December 6, 2016 Up until then I had only heard of their commercial offering which can be found at https://infinit.io/↗ which on the face of it has nothing to do with container storage and is a Dropbox equivalent. Concepts Before we roll our sleeves up and install, configure & user Infinit we need to cover a few of the terms....

I am still catching up on all of the announcements from the AWS re:invent 2016, one of the ones I was interested in was Amazon Lightsail. I have always found Digital Ocean to be useful for launching instances, doing some test installations of XYZ and then terminating them. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would offer a service which allows you to consume resources in the same way Digital Ocean allow their users to, they have the infrastructure to provide as well as an established customer base who probably already use Digital Ocean....

I am late to the party with this post due to other projects↗ and work↗ taking up nearly all of my time, but its one I have been to write for a while. Who would have though that after I first wrote about Docker back in early 2014; Docker↗ that I would be writting a post like this … Microsoft SQL Server 2016 on a Mac, using Docker Given that I don’t use Windows much I thought it would be interesting to see how simple it would be for me to install and use the latest version of MS SQL....

I am pleased to able to say that I have contributed a chapter to the final book in the current The New Stack↗ ebook series on Docker & Containers. The ebook, which is free, is called “Monitoring & Management With Docker & Containers” Container and service-oriented architectures present a complex challenge for monitoring and performance management. Service-driven systems have dramatically increased the number of components monitoring tools interface with. Read how developers and vendors are tackling performance and monitoring in operational and production environments, and what obstacles are unique to managing containerized systems....

So here they are, my top ten albums of 2016. Like last year they are all ones I physically own rather than stream or have brought digitally … The full list is below (I know there are 30) … David Bowie — Blackstar Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool Knifeworld — Bottled Out Of Eden British Theatre — Mastery Charles Bradley — Changes Kate Bush — Before The Dawn The Anchoress — Confessions Of A Romance Novelist Matt Berry — The Small Hours The Sea Nymphs — On The Dry Land Crippled Black Phoenix — Bronze S U R V I V E — RR7349 Iamthemorning — Lighthouse Three Trapped Tigers — Silent Earthling Gong — Rejoice!...