I recently published an article to get CloudFoundry running by way of Stackato on a local machine using VirtualBox. As soon as you have something ready to share with the world (testers, executives, investors, etc.), you’ll want something more public. Fortunately, it’s easy to run Stackato on HPCloud.com. I’m following the steps outlined here: https://docs.stackato.com/admin/server/hpcs.html. Configuration of HPCloud.com For the security groups, I created two separate groups, one for SSH and another for web. I do this to allow for separation of access and web service functions in the future (using a Bastian......
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Stackato, which is released by ActiveState, extends out of the box CloudFoundry. It adds a web interface and a command line client (‘stackato’), although the existing ‘cf’ command line client still works (as long as versions match up). Stackato includes some autoscale features and a very well done set of documentation. ActiveState publishes various VM images that can be used to quickly spin up a development environment. These include images for VMWare, KVM and VirtualBox, among others. In this post I’ll walk through getting a Stackato environment running on Windows using VirtualBox. Install......
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There are some high quality resources that already cover the OpenStack API, so this is a YEA (yet another example) post. See the resources section below for some helpful links. OpenStack APIs provide access to all OpenStack components, such as nova (compute), glance (VM images), swift (object storage), cinder (block storage), keystone (authentication) and neutron (networking). Authentication tokens are valid for a fixed duration, after which they expire and must be replaced. Each service requires it’s own token. Services that are hosted on the same logical server are typically accessible over different ports.......
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I’ve been sneaking up on CloudFoundry for a few weeks now. Each time I try to get a CloudFoundry test environment going I find a couple more technologies that serve either as foundation or support to CloudFoundry. For example, Vagrant, Ansible and Docker all feed into CloudFoundry. Today I come to OpenStack, by way of DevStack (see resources below for more links). Objectives My objectives for this post are get OpenStack up and running by way of DevStack so that I can begin to explore the OpenStack API. CloudFoundry uses the OpenStack API......
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I have recently had to work with a few REST APIs that exhibited some poor design choices that I had previously assumed would be obvious. Since they may not be obvious to everyone, I wanted to highlight them. Idempotent operations When an operation is idempotent that means that an end state will be identical regardless of how many times the operation is executed. If the end state is dependent on the number of times an operation is executed, then it is not idempotent. Why is this important? REST interfaces should assume unreliable networks......
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I’ve been reviewing Docker recently. As part of that review, I decided to build a LEMP stack in Docker. I use Vagrant to create an environment in which to run Docker. For this experiment I chose to create Buildfiles to create the Docker container images. I’ll be discussing the following files in this post. Vagrantfile bootstrap.sh mysql/Dockerfile mysql/mysqlpwdseed nginx/Dockerfile nginx/default nginx/wall.phpVagrantfile bootstrap.sh mysql/Dockerfile mysql/mysqlpwdseed nginx/Dockerfile nginx/default nginx/wall.php Download the Docker LEMP files as a zip (docker-lemp.zip). Spin up the Host System I start with Vagrant to spin up a host system for my......
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The most strikingly different characteristic of Docker, when compared to other deployment platforms, is the single responsibility per container Design (although some see it differently). One reason this looks so different is that many application developers view the complete software stack on which they deploy as a collection of components on a single logical server. For developers of larger applications, who already have experience deploying distributed stacks, the security and configuration complexity of Docker may feel more familiar. Docker brings a fresh approach to distributed stacks; one that may seem overly complex for......
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My objective in this post is to explore the use of Ansible to configure a multi-server LEMP stack. This builds on the preliminary work I did demonstrating how to use Vagrant to create an environment to run Ansible. You can follow this entire example on any Windows (or Linux) host. Ansible only runs on Linux hosts, not Windows. As a result, I needed to provision one Linux host to act as Ansible controller. One aspect of Ansible that I wanted to explore is the ability to manage multiple hosts with different configurations. For......
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Last week I wrote about Vagrant, a fantastic tool to spin up virtual development environments. Today I’m exploring Ansible. Ansible is an open source tool which streamlines certain system administration activities. Unlike Vagrant, which provisions new machines, Ansible takes an already provisioned machine and configures it. This can include installing and configuring software, managing services, and even running simple commands. Ansible doesn’t require any agent software to be installed on the system being managed. Everything is executed over SSH. Ansible only runs on Linux (though I’ve heard of people running it in cygwin......
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I may have just fallen in love with the tool Vagrant. Vagrant makes it possible to quickly create a virtual environment for development. It is different than cloning or snapshots in that it uses minimal base OSes and provides a provisioning mechanism to setup and configure the environment exactly the way you want for development. I love this for a few reasons: All developers work in the exact same environment Developers can get a new environment up in minutes Developers don’t need to be experts at setting up the environment. System details can......
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