Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services

22nd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Similar to other cloud platforms, Azure is starting to leverage containers to provide flexible managed environments for us to run Applications. The App Service on Linux being such a case, allows us to bring in our own home-baked Docker images containing all the tools we need to make our Apps work.
This service is still in preview and obviously has a few limitations:

… [Keep reading] “Preparing your Docker container for Azure App Services”

Google Cloud Platform: an entrée

13th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

The recent opening of a Google Cloud Platform region in Sydney about 2 months ago triggered my interest in learning more about the platform and understand how their offering would affect the local market moving forward.
So far, I have concentrated mainly on GCPs IaaS offering by digging information out of videos, documentation and venturing through the portal and Cloud Shell. I would like to share my first findings and highlight a few features that, in my opinion, make it worth having a closer look.… [Keep reading] “Google Cloud Platform: an entrée”

Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis

10th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Service discovery and hot reconfiguration is a common problem we face in cloud development nowadays. In some cases we can rely on an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do all the work for us. In other cases we can leverage a configuration management system and do the orchestration ourselves. However, there are still some cases where either of these solutions are impractical or just too complex for the immediate problem… and you don’t have a Consul cluster at hand either :(.… [Keep reading] “Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis”

Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature

5th of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Confd is a Golang written binary that can help us make configuration files dynamic. It achieves this by providing a templating engine that is driven by backend data stores like etcd, consul, dynamodb, redis, vault, zookeeper.

https://github.com/kelseyhightower/confd

A few days ago I started putting together a BYO load-balancing PoC where I wanted to use confd and Nginx. I realised however that some features that I needed from confd were not yet released. Not a problem; I was able to compile the master branch and package the resulting binary into an Nginx container all in one go, and without even having Golang installed on my machine.… [Keep reading] “Build from source and package into a minimal image with the new Docker Multi-Stage Build feature”

SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379

3rd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Redis Cache is an advanced key-value store that we should have all come across in one way or another by now. Azure, AWS and many other cloud providers have fully managed offerings for it, which is “THE” way we want to consume it.  As a little bit of insight, Redis itself was designed for use within a trusted private network and does not support encrypted connections. Public offerings like Azure use TLS reverse proxies to overcome this limitation and provide security around the service.… [Keep reading] “SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379”

Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Process Tree

When developing client side JavaScript, one thing that really comes in handy is the ability to create fully functional stubs that can mimic real server APIs. This decouples project development dependencies and allows different team members to work in parallel against an agreed API contract.

To allow people to have an isolated environment to work on and get immediate feedback on their changes, I leverage the Gulp.js + Node.js duo.

“Gulp.js is a task runner that runs on Node.js … [Keep reading] “Gracefully managing Gulp process hierarchy on Windows”

Creating self-signed certs using OpenSSL on Windows

12th of June, 2016 / / 4 Comments

ssl

Working with Linux technologies exposes you to a huge number of open source tools that can simplify and speed up your development workflow. Interestingly enough, many of these tools are now flooding into the Windows ecosystem allowing us to increase the portability of our development assets across multiple operating systems.

Today I am going to demonstrate how easy it is to install OpenSSL on Windows and how simple it is to quickly create self-signed certificates for our development TLS needs that will work on a range of operating systems.… [Keep reading] “Creating self-signed certs using OpenSSL on Windows”