Blog about DevOps, distributed applications and microservices
It finally happened. With release of Windows Server 2016 you can run Docker containers with Windows inside. There’s no Virtual Machine hiding somewhere in order for that to happen, or some sort of Windows emulation built on top of Linux core. It’s true Windows in true Docker, which supports Dockerfiles, docker-compose and other docker-goodies.
Having an app running from within Docker container is fun, that’s for sure. But do you know what would be even more fun? Many apps running from within containers and talking to each other. Imagine that after playing enough with microservices, you finally decided to split some real monolithic web application into: container, serving static web content, and container, serving data through some sort … Continue reading “Communication between Docker containers”
Well, it might seem surprising, given what this blog is usually about, but during most of my career my main focus was… in front-end development. Yup, JavaScript and friends. It wasn’t the only thing I did, but definitely the biggest one. After moving to Canada focus shifted a little bit: I still do occasional front-end tasks for our web project, which … Continue reading “Caveman’s brief look into modern front-end”
Our company is obsessed with IT security, so even though that’s not really my area, every other week I hear something new about the subject, whether I like it or not. However, sometimes interesting thing happen, when I learn about something I’ve been using for years, but only now realized that it actually has a name. I’m talking … Continue reading “Web application firewalls”
I’ve been looking through the latest Technology Radar issue and here’s what I found in its new Techniques section: “TDD’ing containers”. Wow. Mentally, I’m not yet ready to connect TDD to containers, but I took a look at the tools used for that, and those are quite interesting. The first one is serverspec, which allows running BDD-like tests against … Continue reading “How to unit test.. a server with goss”
So far all examples I made for Docker in Swarm Mode or Kubernetes blog posts were built around some sort of a service: web server, message queue, message bus. After all, “service” is a main concept in Swarm Mode, and even the whole micro-service application thing has, well, a “service” in it. But what about … Continue reading “One-off Kubernetes jobs”
Much to my surprise, starting from the last week Kubernetes became the part of my job description. It’s no longer something just interesting to try, I actually have to understand it now. And as you probably could tell from my older k8s post, I’m not quite there. The post sort of builds a logical example (containerized web … Continue reading “Dissecting Kubernetes example”
I’ve been using Gitlab CI for a while now and until certain point it worked really well. We had three build servers (GitLab runners) in the beginning, and when number of teammates or build steps and therefore commits and build jobs increased, I’d just add one more server to handle an extra load and felt that problem was solved. … Continue reading “Autoscaling build servers with Gitlab CI”
Application deployment strategies are really evolving fast. While containerized applications still look hot, there’s something even more interesting happening. What if instead of dealing with application containers we’d got rid of redundant shell and send application functions directly to the cloud? Sounds insane, right? Yet all major cloud providers have function-as-a-service (FaaS) functionality, which along with object storage and database … Continue reading “Another shiny toy – serverless application”
Last month we finally finished migration from our previous CI/CD system to GitLab CE and that’s something that makes me extremely happy. It’s just so much easier to maintain our CI/CD monster, when repository, build configurations, build results, test results and even that “Approve” button that publishes the build to release repository – when they all are in the … Continue reading “Easy continuous integration and deployment with GitLab CI”