Launching a local Kubernetes lab using Minikube

I have more and more people at work asking me about Docker and Kubernetes external link , so I thought it would be good to write down some instructions on bringing up a small test lab on my laptop. I had initially assumed that I would have to spend some time configuring a Vagrant box for this, but then I spotted the Minikube project external link . Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally....

January 1, 2017 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick

Portainer, a UI for Docker

Part of my daily routine is to go through Reddit, RSS feeds and also wading through the MediaGlasses twitter external link 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!...

December 29, 2016 · 9 min · Russ Mckendrick

Playing with Infinit & Docker

At the start of this month Docker purchased a storage startup called Infinit external link . We’re joining @docker! 🐳 🎉 https://t.co/iCTBd0bWLw — Infinit (@infinit) December 6, 2016 Up until then I had only heard of their commercial offering which can be found at https://infinit.io/ external link which on the face of it has nothing to do with container storage and is a Dropbox equivalent. Concepts Before we roll our sleeves up and install, configure & user Infinit we need to cover a few of the terms....

December 27, 2016 · 10 min · Russ Mckendrick

Thoughts on Amazon Lightsail

I am still catching up on all of the announcements from the AWS re:invent 2016, one of the ones I was interested in was Amazon Lightsail. I have always found Digital Ocean to be useful for launching instances, doing some test installations of XYZ and then terminating them. It makes perfect sense that Amazon would offer a service which allows you to consume resources in the same way Digital Ocean allow their users to, they have the infrastructure to provide as well as an established customer base who probably already use Digital Ocean....

December 18, 2016 · 6 min · Russ Mckendrick

It’s a UNIX system, I know this.

I am late to the party with this post due to other projects external link and work external link 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 external link 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....

December 13, 2016 · 3 min · Russ Mckendrick

Monitoring & Managment with Docker & Containers ebook

I am pleased to able to say that I have contributed a chapter to the final book in the current The New Stack external link ebook series on Docker & Containers. The ebook, which is free, is called “Monitoring & Management With Docker & Containers” Container and service-oriented architectures present a complex challenge for monitoring and performance management. Service-driven systems have dramatically increased the number of components monitoring tools interface with....

December 12, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

2016 Top Ten

So here they are, my top ten albums of 2016. Like last year they are all ones I physically own rather than stream or have brought digitally … The full list is below (I know there are 30) … David Bowie — Blackstar Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool Knifeworld — Bottled Out Of Eden British Theatre — Mastery Charles Bradley — Changes Kate Bush — Before The Dawn The Anchoress — Confessions Of A Romance Novelist Matt Berry — The Small Hours The Sea Nymphs — On The Dry Land Crippled Black Phoenix — Bronze S U R V I V E — RR7349 Iamthemorning — Lighthouse Three Trapped Tigers — Silent Earthling Gong — Rejoice!...

December 12, 2016 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick

Annoying Ansible Quirk

I am not sure if this a bug or not, but I spent an hour scratching my head today trying to figure out why part of playbook which was working seemingly suddenly stopped. I have a playbook which executes each morning to create a staging version of a site from the previous night’s snapshots. Each weekday morning at 0730am it … Bootstraps an AWS environment (VPC, ELB and all the other acronyms) Launches a RDS instance from the previous nights snapshot Launches an instances and deploys an application and then creates an AMI Creates an auto-scaling group and launches three instances using the new AMI behind an ELB The base operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 which does not ship with any AWS tools installed by default, so before the tasks which start interacting with the instance and application I run the following;...

November 19, 2016 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick