Author Archives: Viktor Farcic

Continuous Delivery (CD) Is Not What Some Are Trying To Sell You

Since the increase in popularity of continuous delivery (CD), there was an increase in the number of tools marketed as CD solutions. That's normal. It is only natural for software vendors to ride the waves. They need to sell, and there's nothing better to sell than whatever is popular at a given moment. Continuous delivery is one of those "popular" waves.

A video version of the same post is available in The DevOps Toolkit Series YouTube channel.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with buying tools that solve problems. You have a problem, a vendor has a solution, you buy it, they earn money, and you have a good return on investment. Everybody wins, except when the tool does not do what it's supposed to do. That's when we run into issues.

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What Is GitOps And Why Do We Want It?

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GitOps is nothing new. Or, to be more precise, the principles of GitOps existed long before the term was invented. But hey, that's the pattern in our industry. It is the fate of all good practices to be misunderstood, so we need to come up with new names to get people back on track. That is not to say that we are in a constant loop. Instead, I tend to think of it as a periodic reset trying to eliminate misinterpretations. GitOps is one of those resets. It fosters the practices and the ideas that existed for a while now and builds on top of them.

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Serverless Computing With Knative And Containers As A Service (CaaS)

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

All the commands from this article are in the [04-03-knative.sh](Gist with the commands: https://gist.github.com/dc4ba562328c1d088047884026371f1f) Gist.

Before we dive into the actual usage of Knative, let's see which components we got and how they interact with each other. We'll approach the subject by trying to figure out the flow of a request. It starts with a user.

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Google Cloud Run (GCR) vs Azure Container Instances (ACI) vs AWS ECS with Fargate

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Should we use managed Containers as a Service (CaaS)? That must be the most crucial question we should try to answer. Unfortunately, it is hard to provide a universal answer since the solutions differ significantly from one provider to another. Currently (July 2020), CaaS can be described as wild west with solutions ranging from amazing to useless.

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Using Docker To Deploy Applications To Azure Container Instances

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Azure Container Instances are a way to deploy containers in the Cloud. Based on that, you might think that ACI is not much different from other Containers as a Service solutions. But it is. It does not have horizontal scaling, nor any other features often associated with schedulers like Kubernetes. It is limited to the ability to run a single container in isolation. It is very similar to using Docker, except that it is in Azure, and that it saves us from worrying about the infrastructure needed to run containers.

So, if Azure Container Instances are very similar to Docker, why not use docker instead of az CLI? Fortunately, folks at Docker asked themselves the same question and released Docker Desktop that supports ACI. It is available since version 2.3.3+.

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Discussing The “Real” Expectations For Serverless Computing

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

What do I expect from serverless or, for that matter, any type of deployment services?

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What do I really think about managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Personally, I do not think that managed Functions as a Service are a good idea. Functions are too small for my taste. The execution model in which each request is served by a fresh instance is deeply flawed. The pricing is too high for my budget.

All that being said, I can see use cases where managed FaaS is a perfect fit, but only if that would be the only flavor of serverless deployments. But it's not, even though many are putting the equation between FaaS and serverless computing.

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Should we use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS)?

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

We should ask two significant questions when contemplating whether we should use managed Functions as a Service (FaaS) flavor of serverless computing. Should we use them? If we should, shall it be AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions, or something completely different?

So, should we use managed FaaS? We probably should. But that's not the right question. We can almost certainly find at least one good example. A more important question is whether managed FaaS can be the solution for a significant percentage of our workload. That's the question that is much more difficult to tackle. To answer it, we might need first to establish good use cases for deploying and running functions.

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Installing Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL)

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This text was taken from the book and a Udemy course The DevOps Toolkit: Catalog, Patterns, And Blueprints

Help us choose the next subject for the course by filling in a survey at https://www.devopsparadox.com/survey

Linux Shell is essential and I will not go into great length to explain the reasons given that I am assuming that you already know that. So, we'll jump straight into Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It lets us run Linux environment directly on Windows, and without the overhead of a virtual machine. It is part of Windows (not a replacement), so you can keep doing "Windows stuff", while still benefiting from Linux Shells and quite a few other things. It is a much better solution than using Shell emulators like Cygwin or GitBash, and it saves you from wasting resources on a virtual machine. WSL might be the best thing that happened to Windows, at least during the last couple of years.

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Choosing The Right Deployment Strategy

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Deployment strategies affect everyone, no matter whether we are focused only on a single aspect of the application lifecycle or we are in full control. The way we deploy affects the architecture, testing, monitoring, and many other aspects. And not only that, but we can say that architecture, testing, and monitoring affect the way we deploy. All those things are closely related and affect each other.

We'll discuss different deployment strategies and answer a couple of questions. Is your application stateful or stateless? Does its architecture permit scaling? How do you roll back? How do you scale up and down? Do you need your application to run always? Should you use Kubernetes Deployments instead of, let's say, StatefulSets? Answers to those questions will not serve much unless we are familiar with some of the most commonly used deployment strategies. Not only that knowledge will help us choose which one to pick, but they might even influence the architecture of our applications.

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