DevOps 🦾

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; ...

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). ...

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. ...

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. pic.twitter.com/tey47Hhkwo ...

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. ...

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. ...

I have watched numerous videos and seen quite a few slide decks which cover tools such as Puppet, Chef & Ansible. I have witnessed an entire rack of servers PXE boot, installing their base operating systems, configuring their services and then finally checking out a copy of a production ready codebase. Even after seeing this several times the old school sysadmin in me still thinks this is witchcraft. In the world of dedicated servers or virtual machines this is great, however when it comes launching an auto-scaling instance in a service such as Amazon Web Services using orchestration tools in real-time could be the difference in your application staying online or failing. ...