Explore how Russ Mckendrick utilizes Ansible to manage Amazon Web Services infrastructure, from VPC creation to EC2 instance deployment and AMI management.

Amazon Web Services with Ansible

More and more I am having to not only think about how I would ensure that the infrastructure a service I am deploying on is highly available but also how I can manage its entire life-cycle in code. I have tried several tools for this such as Terraform↗ , Puppet and Ansible, however over the last six months or so I have settled on Ansible. After I first looked at it back in December 2014↗ it has come on quite a lot, especially after the version 2 release at the start of this year↗ . ...

September 11, 2016 · 9 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover Russ Mckendrick's colored vinyl playlist for September 2016. Explore the vibrant records played over the past months.

Whats on the deck September 2016

Its been a while since I have posted a playlist, so I thought I would do one of all of the coloured vinyl I have been playing over the last few months … Here are some pictures of them in their full glory …

September 10, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Explore Docker for Amazon Web Services beta, effortlessly launch Docker Swarm clusters on AWS with CloudFormation templates. Easy scaling and management.

Docker for Amazon Web Services Beta

Yesterday the following email dropped into my inbox … … I spend a lot of the day job looking at and talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS) so this had got my interest. In my last book↗ I covered Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and I have to admit that it wasn’t the most greatest service Amazon had released, especially compared the ease you can now launch Swarm Clusters using Docker. ...

August 12, 2016 · 6 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover Docker Swarm on macOS beta, orchestrate services effortlessly, and scale with ease. Step-by-step guide included.

Docker Swarm

As mentioned a few weeks ago I have been part of the Docker for macOS (as its now known) beta for a while. I didn’t pay much attention to the update last night until I just caught up on the tweets from Docker Con and noticed that they have built in orchestration straight into the core Docker Engine. They said it was there now and it will take no time to run so I decided to give it ago; ...

June 30, 2016 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Explore Docker Swarm, load balancing, and DAB with Ansible on Digital Ocean. Step-by-step guide included.

Docker Load Balancing & Application Bundles

Earlier in the week I wrote about the new Docker Swarm functionality, as i didn’t have much time I was just using the Docker for Mac↗ beta. Launching a Swarm cluster To test more of the new features we are going to need a few servers so rather than launching them locally I decided to write an Ansible playbook to launch x number of droplets in Digital Ocean↗ . Once the droplets have launched the playbook goes on to perform the following tasks; ...

June 25, 2016 · 25 min · Russ Mckendrick
Learn to launch a local Rancher cluster effortlessly with Docker for Mac beta and Docker Machine for smooth demo setups.

Launching a local Rancher cluster

Earlier this week I wanted to show someone a copy of Rancher↗ running but I realized that I didn’t have a local lab configured. I managed to quickly launch a few machines in Digital Ocean↗ meaning I could do the demo. Rancher is described as being … From the ground up, Rancher was designed to solve all of the critical challenges necessary to run all of your applications in containers. Rancher provides a full set of infrastructure services for containers, including networking, storage services, host management, load balancing and more. All of these services work across any infrastructure, and make it simple to reliably deploy and manage applications. ...

June 12, 2016 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover Falco by Sysdig, a powerful behavioral security service monitoring system calls.

Falco by sysdig

Earlier this week the guys over at sysdig↗ announced the availability of Falco, a behavioral security service which is built on top of their core Open Source sysdig engine. As is always the case when I try new things, I launched a Digital Ocean↗ Droplet running CentOS 7.2. Once the Droplet was available I ran the command to get the basics configured on the droplet; Falco by sysdig 1/6 curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/russmckendrick/DOBootstrap/master/do-bootstrap.sh | bash Once the Droplet was configured I installed Falco using the repo provided by sysdig by running the following commands; ...

May 22, 2016 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Experience Docker on macOS with enhanced speed and reliability. Learn how to install and leverage its native features seamlessly.

Docker on Mac OSX

I finally have a beta invite for the native OSX version of Docker, well sort of native OSX version, as you can see from the quote below there is still a virtual machine running … Faster and more reliable — No more VirtualBox! On Mac, the Docker Engine runs in an xhyve Virtual Machine (VM) on top of an Alpine Linux distribution. The VM is managed by the native Docker application. On Windows, the Docker Engine is running in a Hyper-V VM. You do not need Docker Machine (docker-machine) to run Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows. ...

May 8, 2016 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick