Tag Archives: DevOps

Ansible Tower 3.1 brings Workflows Log integration and Clustering

Ansible Tower 3.1 brings the new “Workflows” feature allowing you to hook Playbooks, set conditions in executing them and passing data from one Playbook to another.

Additionally Tower can now scale beyond a single instance allowing job processing through any one of the tower nodes in the cluster.

In Tower 3.1 you can easily direct all logs to a central log service such as ELK, Splunk, loggly or others.

More information here: https://www.ansible.com/blog/introducing-asible-tower-3-1

AWS Lambda 5 cool features

What I liked:

  1. Versions and aliases (prod as an alias can point to the active function)
  2. Scheduling of actions
  3. Support for Python and others
  4. Dynamic – No need to setup servers
  5. VPC support – can communicate with other services you have internally
  6. Integration with CloudWatch (inspect and Analyze incoming log entries)

Recent DockerCon EU Black Magic bits highlights, Tips and Tools

I remember how I felt years ago, when I had the first couple of Linux and Windows Virtual machines running in the lab. It was a great sense of freedom, from hardware limitations, from lost time and productivity. It was real Magic.

Then about 2 years ago, when Docker started its journey, it almost felt like black magic. The speed, the embedded versioning, the Freedom from the Operating system cage…

Looking at the new opportunities and energy at the recent DockerCon EU (2015), feels like a visit to Harry Potter’s Hogwarts castle. Anyway, enough with the story, let’s dig into some tech bits:

  1. Impressive focus on security, quality,scalability and stability (See the Keynote as well as this session)
  2. Docker Trusted Registry – Easy signing of your code using UBkey stick (a bit later AWS launched its own Docker registry service..)
  3. Remote revocation of signed code in case of compromise
  4. Nautilus- Automatic vulnerability scan of code that is uploaded into Dockerhub
  5. Internal Dockerhub on premise option including the secure code signing and Nautilus features
  6. Swarm cluster scales from 10 to 1000 nodes running 50,000 containers without any hiccups!
  7. Docker Universal Control plane – the dashboard for managing your docker swarm as well as on-the-fly secret data insertion and rotation, On-The-Fly insertion of specific Docker images across Swarm nodes.
  8. Docker Remote API that allows remote CLI, remote Compose and Docker Swarm
  9. Docker compose now
    1. Includes the network overlay system that automatically allows containers to find each other and applications merely call hostnames without worrying  about name resolution
    2. Allows you to assign volumes to specific containers, which allows mixing of both persistent and non-persistent applications
  10. Started supporting seccomp for more granular Docker permissions as well as user namespaces which allows a process inside a container to “believe” it is running as root, while in fact it’s not
  11. Docker monitoring resources
    1. A massive list of tools on Github
    2. InfluxDB – Platform for Time Series data
    3. cAdvisor
    4. Grafana
    5. VegasBrianc/docker-monitoring
    6. Prometheus
  12. Docker tools
    1. Docker Bridge: Interlock, Registrator
    2. Service Registry: etcd, consul, zookeeper
    3. Template: Interlock, confd, consul-template
  13. Reverse Proxy: HAProxy, NGINX, Traefik
  14. Docker sidekicks – special containers that provide Service Discovery, HealthChecks and orchestration through a REST API. Examples include Amazon ECS Agents, AWS Beanstalk, COREOS, Docker Ambassador
  15. DCOS – The DataCenter Operating System – The Mesosphere Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) is a new kind of operating system that spans all of the machines in your datacenter or cloud. It provides a highly elastic, and highly scalable way of deploying applications, services and big data infrastructure on shared resources including AWS, GCP, Azure.
  16. Docker for Windows
    1. Will not run Linux images
    2. Same code base as Docker for Linux
    3. Requires Windows Server 2016
    4. Includes an abstraction layer between Docker and the Windows Kernel
    5. The Docker C:\Windows maps to \Global?\C:\Windows
    6. Contains all Windows device entry points including C: and \Registry, \Device\TCP
    7. Each container has its own “chrooted” devices
    8. File system is hybrid of UnionFS and NTFS: Virtual Block Device + NTFS partition per container Symlinks to layers on host FS
  17. Sundial – Rides on top of AWS ECS (Docker on AWS) and offers aggregation of Docker JOBS / ECS into processes with dependency tree graphical representation and central logging and control
  18. Great sessions you should NOT miss
    1. Green Font, Black Background – Docker Security by Example
    2. Cgroups, namespaces, and beyond: what are containers made from?
    3. Cultural Revolution – How to Manage the Changes Docker Brings
    4. How to be successful running Docker in Production
    5. Continuous Integration with Jenkins, Docker and Compose

(Native) Docker Windows Containers Revealed

If you were wondering how exactly does Native Docker for Windows Server look, you would love this Native Docker containers on Windows walk through done by Microsoft Channel9 Visual Studio podcast.

Here is what I loved about it:

  1. General yet very good explanation of what docker is all about and why should you care
  2. What does Native Docker for Windows look like (basically the host for containers is based on Windoes Core edition)
  3. Clarifying the confusion around the mixing of Linux Windows and Docker
  4. Live Demo of launching Windows Docker containers right from Visual Studio deploying the .NET application you develop and into Azure host

Got any other great Docker resources you want to share?

Yours

Jack

Deep AWS CLI stuff..

If you are an AWS DevOps girl or guy, you want to check this video out soon

Highlights I liked:

  1. Using JMESPath to exercise AWS CLI Queries
  2. AWS CLI Wait-for (successful completion of a command) new option
  3. AWS CLI Generate Skeleton to create a JSON file you can customise later on and feed to another command
  4. Using the new “Assume Role” authentication option

And more…