I’ve recently had some people ask how I deploy MongoDB. For a while I used their excellent online tool to deploy and monitor my clusters. Unfortunately they changed direction and I couldn’t afford their new tools, so I turned to Ansible. In order more easily share the process, I posted a simple example that you can run locally using Vagrant to deploy MongoDB using Ansible. https://github.com/dwatrous/ansible-mongodb As soon as you finish running the Ansible script, you can immediately connect to MongoDB and start working with Data. If you’re looking to learn more about......
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I’ve recently been involved with several groups interested in using Hadoop to process large sets of data, including use of higher level abstractions on top of Hadoop like Pig and Hive. What has surprised me most is that no one is automating their installation of Hadoop. In each case that I’ve observed they start by manually provisioning some servers and then follow a series of tutorials to manually install and configure a cluster. The typical experience seems to take about a week to setup a cluster. There is often a lot of wasted......
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I have observed that discussions about CloudFoundry often lack accurate context. Some questions I get that indicate context is missing include: What Java version does CloudFoundry support? What database products/versions are available How can I access the server directly? There are a few reasons that the questions above are not relevant for CloudFoundry (or any modern PaaS environment). To understand why, it’s important to understand how we got to PaaS and where we came from. Landscape When computers were first becoming a common requirement for the enterprise, most applications were monolithic. All applicaiton......
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It seems like most of the development around CloudFoundry and bosh happen on Linux or Mac. Getting things up and running in Windows was a real challenge. Below is how I worked things out. **Make sure you have a modern processor that supports all virtualization technologies, such as VTx and extended paging. Aside from the deviations mentioned below, I’m following the steps documented at https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-lite Changes to Vagrantfile I’m using VirtualBox on Windows 7. To begin with, I modified the Vagrantfile to create two VMs rather than a single VM. The first is......
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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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