Making application configuration files dynamic with confd and Azure Redis

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

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”

Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)

On a recent project I was part of a team developing an AngularJS website with a C# ASP.NET backend API hosted in Azure.  It was a great project as I got to work with a bunch of new tools, but it got me wondering on how simple it could be to use a Javascript API instead.  That way the entire development stack would be written in Javascript.

And so a personal project was born.  To create a simple JS API and get it running in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Creating a simple nodejs API on AWS (including nginx)”