Category: containers (Page 1 of 1)

Trying AliCloud

There are few options in the cloud that are really worth investing time in. Amazon (AWS) is clearly important as the market leader, and Google Cloud (GCP) offers a variety of very interesting technology. Microsoft (Azure) has some remarkable technology, especially for Windows-oriented shops. After that, options are much smaller scale: there are big names like IBM (BlueMix) to much newer startups (such as Digital Ocean). None of them are very distinct. However, if we’re willing to take a slightly less western-centric approach, there is another: AliCloud.

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The CTO’s guide to containers/serverless changes – re:Invent 2017

Gosh, I wish I was at re:Invent. Personally, I don’t like the States much (the place is great; getting through the airports is an exercise in frustration) and while I’ve never been to Las Vegas there isn’t much that ordinarily attracts me to the place. But, to have so many incredible people in one place – amazing.

For those – like me – not there, what do the announcements today mean? I’m not going to focus on the tech so much, but more on the additional options and architecture that is becoming available. Let’s look at a strategic level.

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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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Articulating the ATOM approach

It’s interesting watching history repeat itself. There are a number of fashions that come and go in technology: thin client computing comes back every twenty years or so, for example. In the 80s, Unix was very big – it faded a bit in the nineties but then came roaring back with Linux.

Another venerable bit of software is coming back into fashion – good old Make. It’s not the perfect tool by any means, and the niche it once had is no longer that relevant. However, I think we’re going to see a growth in its usage once again. Let me explain why.

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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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