Explore Docker's new networking features with Weave for encrypted, multi-host container networking. See the magic in action!

Docker Networking Magic

I have been quiet on here as I am in the process of writing again, one of things I have been looking at is Dockers new networking features. This gave me an excuse to have a play with Weave. Rather than go into too much detail here, lets go all click bait because you won’t believe what happened next. I launched two hosts in Digital Ocean↗ , one in London and then one in New York City using Docker Machine;...

February 25, 2016 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Experience Alpine Linux for ultra-compact Docker images. Drastically reduce container size. Find my images on Docker Hub & GitHub.

Tiny Docker Images

I had a play with the excellent Alpine Linux↗ over the weekend. Alpine describes itself as; Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. And by lightweight they really do mean lightweight, with an 8MB container size and a 130MB bare metal installation it is tiny. Because of this I decided to use it as the new base images for my Docker Images↗ as some of them were getting a little bloated....

February 1, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Explore top albums of 2015 from various artists, including Steven Wilson, Vennart, Leon Bridges, and more. Check out my eclectic music picks!

Top Ten Albums 2015

Here are my top ten and bit albums of 2015 (yes I know one is a remake, one was first released in 2014 and one is an EP). Steven Wilson Hand. Cannot. Erase.↗ Vennart The Demon Joke↗ Charlie Barnes More Stately Mansions↗ Leon Bridges Coming Home↗ Sweet Billy Pilgrim Motorcade Amnesiacs↗ Nordic Giants A Séance of Dark Delusions↗ Gary Clark Jr. The Story of Sonny Boy Slim↗ Julia Holter Have You in My Wilderness↗ Dave Gahan & Soulsavers Angels & Ghosts↗ New Order Music Complete↗ Public Service Broadcasting The Race for Space↗ Faith No More Sol Invictus↗ Coheed and Cambria The Color Before the Sun↗ Monster Magnet Cobras and Fire↗ Crippled Black Phoenix New Dark Age↗ Cleft Bosh↗ There are also lists for 2014 and 2013....

December 27, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover Jenkins for automation on CentOS 7 with NGINX SSL setup. Orchestrate tasks efficiently!

Jenkins

Jenkins has always been a bit of an elephant in the room to me. Not being a developer I have always just shrugged it off a tool used for running unit tests, however, as I moving more into orchestration and automation I am finding the need for a tool which can run both tasks and unit tests, so this weekend I decided to finally take the plunge and have a play around with it....

December 20, 2015 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Learn effective Docker container monitoring techniques in my newly released book. Order your copy from Packt Publishing or Amazon now!

Monitoring Docker Released

As mentioned in a post a few months ago I have been working on a book about the various ways you can approach monitoring your Docker containers, I am proud to announce that it was published today by Packt Publishing↗ . You can order your copy from the Packt website↗ or Amazon↗ . A free sample of the book can be found here↗ .

December 15, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Russ Mckendrick explores Flocker on CentOS 7, enhancing Dockerized applications with robust persistent storage solutions.

Flocker on CentOS 7

I have been reading about Flocker↗ for quite a while and it’s been something I have been meaning to look at since the introduction of plugins back in the Docker 1.7 release↗ . But I have been busy looking at other parts of Docker. Since I had a few hours this weekend I thought it was about time and had a play. ClusterHQ describes Flocker as; Flocker is an open-source container data volume manager for your Dockerized application....

December 13, 2015 · 11 min · Russ Mckendrick
Russ Mckendrick tackles AWS security group hurdles installing Puppet Enterprise, resolves by temporarily allowing all traffic.

Puppet Enterprise & AWS Security Groups

This week I had to do a few installations of Puppet Enterprise on an EC2 instance. Although this seemed like a simple enough task, I did hit upon one annoying issue. I was doing a Monolithic installation as it was just for testing, I had done this several times on Digital Ocean↗ and locally using a Vagrant box↗ with no issue at all. Reading through the documenation I had to open the following...

November 15, 2015 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Russ Mckendrick improves blog speed, adds Gruntfile features for testing and deployment to Amazon S3 with Cloudflare cache flushing.

More site updates

Since the last post about the blog I have been playing with the blog a bit more, I have finally got a decent PageSpeed Insights Score↗ ; It’s annoying that the Disqus javascript is keeping me from getting 100/100 but considering before I started to tweak things I was getting a score of 85/100 so I can’t complain too much. I have also adding the following functionality to my Gruntfile↗ grunt test — Runs a PageSpeed Insight test from the command line and highlights if either the mobile or desktop test drops below 95/100 grunt grab — Grabs the external Javascript needed to run the site so I can serve it locally....

October 11, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick