How and Why? Let’s say you have a server that has been lovingly hand-crafted that you want to containerize. Figuring out exactly what software is required on there and what config files need adjustment would be quite a task, but fortunately blueprint exists as a solution to that. What I’ve done here is automate that … Read more
Introduction If you’ve used Jenkins for a while in production, then you will be aware that Jenkins frequently publishes updates to its server for security and functionality changes. On a dedicated, non-dockerized host, this is generally managed for you through package management. With Docker it can get slightly more complicated to reason about upgrades, as you’ve likely separated out … Read more
Jenkins Pipelines are becoming the standard way to programmatically specify your CI flow. I started playing with Jenkins Pipelines using the web interface, then hit a block as I didn’t really know the ropes. Here’s some things I wish I’d known first: 1) Wrap work in stages Want those neat stages to show up in … Read more
Here is a list of books that have helped and changed not only my career, but also my life. If there’s a theme to them, it’s that they are less about IT than how people interact with technology, and how an understanding of that can make you and your organisation more efficient. The Goal Published … Read more
tl;dr For several years I managed the 3rd line site reliability operation for many of the world’s busiest gambling sites, working for a little-known company that built and ran the core backend online software for several businesses that each at peak could take tens of millions of pounds in revenue per hour. I left a … Read more
Recently I’ve been testing clusters of VMs running on my local host. I thought that there must be a standard way to test multi-node VM setups, but asking around at work, and on github yielded no answers. So I came up with my own solution, which I outline here. ShutItFile A ShutItFile is a superset … Read more
Regular readers will be familiar with ShutIt, a framework I work on that allows me to automate all sorts of workflows and tools that I publish on GitHub. This article demonstrates a new feature that uses this platform to make doing expect-type tasks trivial. Embedded ShutIt In response to a request, I recently added a … Read more
tl;dr Quickly spin up multiple VMs with useful DNSs on your local machine and automate complex environments easily. Here’s a video: Multinode VM Setup Recorded by ianmiellasciinema.org Introduction Maintaining Docker at scale, I’m more frequently concerned with clusters of VMs than the containers themselves. The irony of this is not lost on me. Frequently I … Read more
Summary Following on from my previous post setting up an OpenShift cluster in Vagrant, this post discusses migrating an etcd cluster within a live OpenShift instance to newer servers. Moving a standalone etcd cluster is relatively straightforward, but when it’s part of an OpenShift cluster — and especially one that’s live and operational — it is a little more … Read more
tl;dr Following on from my Kubernetes post here, I have automated an OpenShift Origin cluster using the same tools. Video Here is a video of the whole process. OpenShift setup in Vagrant asciinema.org It gets (relatively) interesting later on, as a lot of the process is Vagrant starting up and yum installs failing on bad … Read more