Category: Development

Categories
Development Operations Web

SSL to the people

I have lost count of how many hours, days and even weeks I’ve wasted because of un-trusted self-signed/generated certificates in my time as a developer. Some util always trips up, makes me add a flag and then still fails. Trying to install custom root certificates works for some software, not all. It’s a complete mess and I long for the day it will be over.

Now, there is a solution: Let’s encrypt. Just get trusted certificates everywhere. Free, quick and easy. This will not give you all the levels of verification and trust that you can get from an SSL certificate; but it gives you an encrypted connection to every server out there. It’s way better than just HTTP, and it’s quick and easy.

Still beta, but took me about 10 minutes to set it up for this blog. Run, answer a question, check something and answer another. Bam! Encrypted! 🙂

Some thoughts and further links from Schneier.

Categories
Architecture Development

A kind of Microservices reading list

I’ve been working with Microservices for the last couple of years. It was kind of an uncharted territory back when we started. But the attention on the net and in the community has increased a lot over the past year and this spring and summer brought quite a few sobering experience reports. It is definitely not failing, but there are some real considerations to be aware of, and some of them are quite major non-technical issues. Culture and organisation needs to be changed to support working in a highly distributed manner with Microservices.

So if you’re considering Microservices, you’ll be in for an exciting ride. For many it makes sense, but do read these articles and watch the videos to make sure you don’t just make a gigantic leap of faith. Being prepared for the issues will help you move forward when the going gets tough. 🙂

So here we go:

And if you have only two hours, watch these videos. A very clear message by two very good speakers:

If you’re Norwegian speaking you might also want to check out our talk about our experiences at my current client: https://vimeo.com/album/1807533/video/105777592 .

Let me know what I’ve missed. 🙂

Categories
Development Operations OS tricks

Speeding up development cycles with Docker

When I started doing Puppet development I was looking for a nice way to do testing. Vagrant was the best option at the time. But when Docker surfaced, and I figured it could speed things up considerably. And it does. 🙂

If you would like to move on to the code you can find my setup on Github. It should’nt take much work to transfer to your project or something else that is similar without Puppet. Go to Github for the code: https://github.com/anderssv/puppet-docker .

Let me know what you think. The README should help you getting started, but let me know if anything can be changed. 🙂

Docker is some kick ass technology. It can be used for a wide variety of many tasks. It gives complete isolation between containers when it comes to processes and software, while NOT reserving large amounts of disk, memory or CPU. And it is lightning fast (really, starting a new container takes less than a second)! Look into it if you haven’t.

Doing Puppet means that you need a VM, but you also you need to reset it every once in a while to simulate building a machine from the bottom up. Combining the mechanisms in Docker I was able to minimise what happens when you reset, except for the things Puppet does of course. So I have:

  • Created a Docker image (not uploaded to repo, created on the fly by the scripts) that can be used for launching Puppet scripts. Having everything like puppet rpms etc. installed, updated and available saves a lot of time when running.
  • Launch a SSH Daemon. This serves two purposes: Keeping the container running and allowing for a interface to run the puppet command.
  • Kill the container to reset, so you will get a “fresh” container to run on.

Doing this enables you to “boot” a fresh new image in no time, and get running Puppet scripts as fast as possible. It is my new favorite toy for automating and virtualising tests. 🙂 Let me know if there’s anything I can make clearer.