Examine the web fortunes of Dragons Den businesses. Study site performance under heavy traffic & learn resilience tips.

Slain by Dragons

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den↗ series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic. ...

July 13, 2015 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick
Effortless deployment of Puppet on CentOS/RHEL? Check out my updated installation script and streamline your automation setup today!

Update to Puppet Install Script

Around this time last year I blogged about Upgrading my servers to CentOS 7, the post contained a link to a script which I wrote to deploy a Puppet Master & Agent and some updated instructions for installing on RHEL / CentOS 7. As those instructions no longer work, and I needed to install a Puppet Master to have a play with I decided to update the installation script. After a little reading it looks like installing a Puppet Master with Apache and Passenger is a little old fashioned since the release of Puppet Server↗ . ...

July 12, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover the updated one-liner Docker installer for CentOS 7. Install Docker 1.7 and docker-compose effortlessly with the official RPM and a single command.

Update to CentOS 7 Docker install one-liner

UPDATE 26/07/2015 In typical fashion, a few weeks after posting this Docker themselves released a much better version than mine, you can install it using the following commands; Update to CentOS 7 Docker install one-liner 1/2 curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | sh systemctl enable docker && systemctl start docker docker run hello-world What follows is the original, now mostly redundant post. It’s been a while since I touched the code for the one-liner Docker installer I wrote a while back. ...

June 28, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Get your CentOS 7 DigitalOcean droplet up and running in no time! Learn how to perform essential tasks for a smooth deployment.

Digital Ocean Bootstrap

As I have mentioned a few times on this blog I tend to use DigtialOcean↗ to spin up servers for testing and to host some of my projects. I also still use CentOS 7 as my preferred OS. Each time I boot a droplet I run few a couple of tasks to get the server how I prefer it. Run a yum update Enable swap Install & configure Fail2Ban Enable firewalld Install vim-enhanced, deltarpm & enable EPEL↗ As I am lazy and sometimes re-launch instances several times when working on a project I decided to write a quick script to do the above so I don’t have to↗ . ...

June 28, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick
Learn how to quickly install OpenStack Kilo on CentOS 7 using Vagrant and RedHat RDO. Follow step-by-step instructions for setting up a test environment.

Quick OpenStack Kilo Installation

I am going to be playing with OpenStack over the next few weeks so I decided to create a Vagrant script which would bootstrap a working OpenStack Kilo↗ installation using RedHat RDO↗ . It uses my CentOS 7 Vagrant box↗ and works with both VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion. To get it up and running create a folder for the Vagrantfile to live; Quick OpenStack Kilo Installation 1/4 mkdir -p ~/Machines/OpenStack/ Download a copy of the Vagrantfile; ...

May 24, 2015 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick
Learn how to install and run OpenShift Origin V3 on CentOS, step-by-step guide with commands and configuration for setting up a test server using Vagrant.

OpenShift Origin V3

After being nagged by the gaffer to try OpenShift Origin V3 I finally got round to running a test server using Vagrant on my Mac. I must say, going into this that the documentation at this stage is struggling a little to keep up with the development and these instructions are the results of much trial, error & Googling. Also, the product is very much still in active development and there have been several bugs, like this one↗ , which have caused the instructions below not to work. ...

May 23, 2015 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick
Learn how to install the ELK stack on CentOS 7 for centralized logging: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, step-by-step guide with configuration.

Installing an ELK Stack on CentOS 7

I haven’t installed an ELK stack since CentOS 7 came out, all of the components which go to make up the stack have been updated quite bit since then so I decided to have a go at installing the stack on a clean CentOS 7 installation. ELK? ELK is a term used for a combination of three Open Source products from Elastic↗ ; Elasticsearch↗ — Search & Analyze Data in Real Time Logstash↗ — Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data Kibana↗ — Explore & Visualize Your Data All three products can be used independently, but when they are used together you find yourself with both a powerful and scaleable central logging service. ...

April 19, 2015 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick
Discover the 2015 AWS Summit in London: insights into Amazon EFS, hybrid architectures, and the challenges of navigating the bustling crowd.

AWS London Summit 2015

I spent Wednesday out of the office at the 2015 AWS Summit in London. It was the first time I had been to a full on AWS event and I must say I was impressed by the scale (pun intended). The main keynote was interesting, and it was great to hear all about new Elastic File System↗ which is going to be a godsend for those who need to have some level of shared storage. ...

April 18, 2015 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick