Author Archives: Viktor Farcic

Zombies Are Muttering “Agile”, “DevOps”, “Containers”, “Big Data”, and “Microservices”

The Ten Commandments Of Continuous Delivery

Everyone wants to implement continuous delivery. After all, the benefits are too big to be ignored. Increase the speed of delivery, increase the quality, decrease the costs, free people to dedicate time on what brings value, and so on and so forth. Those improvements are like music to any decision maker. Especially if that person has a business background. If a tech geek can articulate the benefits continuous delivery brings to the table, when he asks a business representative for a budget, the response is almost always “Yes! Do it.”

A continuous delivery project will start. Tests will be written. Builds will be scripted. Deployments will be automated. Everything will be tied into an automated pipeline and triggered on every commit. Everyone will enter a state of nirvana as soon as all that is done. There will be a huge inauguration party with a vice president having the honor to be the first one to press the button that will deploy the first release to production. Isn’t that a glorious plan everyone should be proud of?
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Managing Secrets In Docker Swarm Clusters

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Docker 1.13 introduced a set of features that allow us to centrally manage secrets and pass them only to services that need them. They provide a much-needed mechanism to provide information that should be hidden from anyone except designated services.

A secret (at least from Docker’s point of view) is a blog of data. A typical use case would be a certificate, SSH private keys, passwords, and so on. Secrets should stay secret meaning that they should not be stored unencrypted or transmitted over a network.
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Blue-Green Deployments With Docker Services Running Inside a Swarm Cluster

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I am continuously getting questions about blue-green releases inside a Docker Swarm cluster. Viktor, in your The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit book you told us to use blue-green deployment. How do we do it with services running inside a Swarm cluster? My answer is usually something along the following lines. With the old Swarm, blue-green releases were easier than rolling updates (neither were supported out of the box). Now we got rolling updates. Use them! The reaction to that is often that we still want blue-green releases.

This post is my brainstorming on this subject. I did not write it as a result of some deep thinking. There is no great wisdom in it. I just wrote what was passing through my mind while I was trying to answer another one of the emails containing blue-green deployment questions. What follows might not make much sense. Don’t be harsh on me.
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Using Docker Stack And Compose YAML Files To Deploy Swarm Services

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Bells are ringing! Docker v1.13 is out!

The most common question I receive during my Docker-related talks and workshops is usually related to Swarm and Compose.

Someone: How can I use Docker Compose with Docker Swarm?

Me: You can’t! You can convert your Compose files into a Bundle that does not support all Swarm features. If you want to use Swarm to its fullest, be prepared for docker service create commands that contain a never ending list of arguments.
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It’s alive! The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm Is Finished

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I published The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm on LeanPub early. I think that only around 20% was written when it went public. That allowed you to get early access to the material, and me to get your feedback. The result is fantastic. Many send me their notes, reported bugs, proposed suggestions for improvements, recommended tools and processes that should be explored, and so on.
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Choosing The Right Tools To Create And Manage Docker Swarm Clusters In AWS

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Swarm Mode is taking Docker scheduling by the storm. You tried it in your lab or by setting up a few VMs locally and joining them into a Swarm cluster. Now it’s time to move it to the next level and create a cluster in AWS. Which tools should you use to do that? How should you set up your AWS Swarm cluster?

If you are like me, you already discarded the option to create servers manually through AWS Console, enter each with SSH, and run commands that will install Docker Engine and join the node with others. You know better than that and want a reliable and automated process that will create and maintain the cluster.

Among a myriad of options, we can choose from to create a Docker Swarm cluster in AWS, three stick from the crowd. We can use Docker Machine with AWS CLI, Docker for AWS as CloudFormation template, and Packer with Terraform. That is, by no means, the final list of the tools we can use. The time is limited and I promised to myself that this article will be shorter than War and Peace so I had to draw the line somewhere. Those three combinations are, in my opinion, the best candidates as your tools of choice. Even if you do choose something else, this article, hopefully, gave you an insight into the direction you might want to take.
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