Category: freesoftware (Page 1 of 8)

Faster Continuous Integration with some stowage patterns

Everyone wants faster Continuous Integration (CI). The quicker you can get from commit to test results, the better – but there’s a bit of tension here. A CI should start close to “first principles”, so that you know an entire build is good and repeatable. But the more work the CI is doing, the slower it will go.

I’ve mentioned before that I use a combination of stowage and container-based CI systems, and in professional life we’re very heavily invested in GitLab now (which is an excellent system in general). Containers are a good starting point for CI, because they’re very easy to set up, do some work, and then throw away again. Getting clean builds is very straightforward.

Today I released version 0.5.0 of stowage, which brings a few additional small features which really simplifies usage in CI.

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Initial impressions on Symfony 3.3

I wrote a couple of times previously about Symfony 4, particularly the architecture and use of Makefiles. It’s now at the point of being testable, so I took it for a short spin.

One comment for Linux users: your operating system will probably need an upgrade. I’m a Fedora user, and the stable release only includes PHP 7.0. Although that’s recent, it’s not good enough. Thankfully Fedora 26 has been in alpha a little while, and the beta is due at the end of this month. It was an easy upgrade, and includes PHP 7.1.4, a new enough version.

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Fedora’s revised mission

Coming up with convincing vision and mission in a corporate environment is never easy – in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult things you can do. Setting a clear and crisp vision is crucial to create an aligned organisation. Refining down into an elevator-pitch sized statement while avoiding generalisations, platitudes and (frankly) abstract jibberish is practically impossible. Doing so outside a corporate environment I think is even more difficult – money is at least a straightforward motivation to hang a hat on.

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Symfony 4 and a flex-able approach

The news about plans for Symfony 4 has got a number of my dev team a bit excited about the possibilities – although, so far, there is precious little information about the new tool, Flex, and exactly what “composition over inheritance” will mean in practice.

One similar solution that this reminds me strongly of is Django, and its approach to “apps” – although this isn’t necessarily highlighted, a composition-type system ships with Django and comes with a number of both positive and negative implications.

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Habitus: the right way to build containers

So, after my previous slightly ranty post, I’ve been trying out a few different tools and approaches to building containers, attempting to find something which is closer to my idea of what good looks like. One tool stands out from the rest: Habitus.

Habitus provides just-enough-Make to bring some sanity to the Docker build process, with the following killer features:

  1. ability to order container builds by expressing a dependency from one to another
  2. first-class support for artefacts created during the container build process, which can be extracted and used as input for later builds
  3. management API to provide build-time secrets into the containers

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The ongoing poverty of the Docker environment

I spent a few hours this weekend attempting to re-acquaint myself with the Docker system and best practices by diving in and updating a few applications I run. I wrote up an article no long after Docker’s release, saying that it looked pretty poor, and unfortunately things haven’t really changed – this doesn’t stop me using it, but it’s a shame that the ecosystem apparently has learnt nothing from those that came before.

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Containing incestuousness

Having droned on a little the other day about duplication in Stackanetes (in hindsight, I had intended to make a “it’s turtles all the way down” type jibe), I’ve been delighted to read lots of other people spouting the same opinion – nothing quite so gratifying as confirmation bias. Massimo has it absolutely right when he describes container scheduling as an incestuous orgy (actually, he didn’t, I just did, but I think that was roughly his point).

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Stackanetes

There’s a great demo from the recent OpenStack Summit (wish I had been there): OpenStack is a known massive pain to get up and running, and having it in a reasonable set of containers that might be used to deploy it by default is really interesting to see. This is available in Quay as Stackanetes, which is a pretty awful name (as is Stackenetes, and Stackernetes, both of which were googlewhacks earlier today) for some great work.

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Some notes on Serverless design: “macro-function oriented architecture”

Over the past couple of days I’ve been engaged in a Twitter discussion about serverless. The trigger for this was Paul Johnston‘s rather excellent series of posts on his experiences with serverless, wrapped up in this decent overview. First, what is serverless? You can go over and read Paul’s explanation; my take is that there isn’t really a great definition for this yet. Amazon’s Lambda is the canonical implementation, and as the name kind of gives away, it’s very much a function-oriented environment: there are no EC2 instances to manage or anything like that, you upload some code and that code is executed on reception of an event – then you just pay for the compute time used.

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Tech2020

For a while now, I have been waxing lyrical (to those who will listen) about the variety of new tools and analyses available to people who want to prognosticate. If nothing else, the current craze for data within most businesses has resulted in people almost literally swimming around in the stuff without an awful lot of an idea about what to do with it, and while this has lead to some unspeakably shambolic practices (those who know me will likely have heard me on my hobby horse about proving models with actual experimentation) it has also opened up new horizons for people like me.

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