Category Archives: Tutorial

Canary Deployments To Kubernetes Using Istio: Why Did We Do Such a Course?

Drawing by Sara Farcic

A while ago, we (Viktor Farcic and Darin Pope) thought it would be a good idea to add an out-of-the-box option to use canary deployments in Jenkins X. We should have finished it by now, and yet we did not even start working on it. Instead of just adding it to Jenkins X, we spent considerable time exploring the subject.

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Deploying Containers with Docker Swarm and Docker Networking

The purpose of this article is to explore new Docker networking features introduced in version 1.9. We’ll apply them to a Docker Swarm cluster. For practice purposes we’ll be deploying containers to a Swarm cluster created locally with Vagrant and running Consul as a service registry and Registrator as a tool that will monitor Docker daemons and register/de-register containers we run/stop. When combined, Consul and Registrator will act as service discovery within our cluster. I won’t go into details how Docker Swarm or service discovery works. You can find more information about those subject in the following articles.

We’ll skip straight into Docker networking features used within a Swarm cluster.
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Scaling To Infinity with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 4/4) – Scaling Individual Services

This article should be considered deprecated since it speaks about the old (standalone) Swarm. To get more up-to-date information about the new Swarm mode, please read the Docker Swarm Introduction (Tour Around Docker 1.12 Series) article or consider getting the The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm book.

This series is split into following articles.

In the previous article we switched from manual to automatic deployment with Jenkins and Ansible. In the quest for zero-downtime we employed Consul to check health of our services and, if one of them fails, initiate deployment through Jenkins.

In this article we’ll explore how to scale individual services.

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Scaling To Infinity with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 3/4) – Blue-Green Deployment, Automation and Self-Healing Procedure

This article should be considered deprecated since it speaks about the old (standalone) Swarm. To get more up-to-date information about the new Swarm mode, please read the Docker Swarm Introduction (Tour Around Docker 1.12 Series) article or consider getting the The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm book.

This series is split into following articles.

In the previous article we manually deployed the first version of our service together with a separate instance of the Mongo DB container. Both are (probably) running on different servers. Docker Swarm decided where to run our containers and Consul stored information about service IPs and ports as well as other useful information. That data was used to link one service with another as well as to provide information nginx needed to create proxy.

We’ll continue where we left and deploy a second version of our service. Since we’re practicing blue/green deployment, the first version was called blue and the next one will be green. This time there will be some additional complications. Deploying the second time is a bit more complicated since there are additional things to consider, especially since our goal is to have no downtime.

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Scaling To Infinity with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 2/4) – Manually Deploying Services

This article should be considered deprecated since it speaks about the old (standalone) Swarm. To get more up-to-date information about the new Swarm mode, please read the Docker Swarm Introduction (Tour Around Docker 1.12 Series) article or consider getting the The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm book.

This series is split into following articles.

The previous article showed how scaling across the server farm looks like. We’ll continue where we left and explore details behind the presented implementation. Orchestration has been done through Ansible. Besides details behind tasks in Ansible playbooks, we’ll see how the same result could be accomplished using manual commands in case you might prefer a different orchestration/deployment framework.

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Scaling To Infinity with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 1/4) – A Taste of What Is To Come

This article should be considered deprecated since it speaks about the old (standalone) Swarm. To get more up-to-date information about the new Swarm mode, please read the Docker Swarm Introduction (Tour Around Docker 1.12 Series) article or consider getting the The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Docker Swarm book.

This series is split into following articles.

Previous articles put a lot a focus on Continuous Delivery and Containers with Docker. In Continuous Integration, Delivery or Deployment with Jenkins, Docker and Ansible I explained how to continuously build, test and deploy micro services packaged into containers and do that across multiple servers, without downtime and with the ability to rollback. We used Ansible, Docker, Jenkins and few other tools to accomplish that goal.

Now it’s time to extend what we did in previous articles and scale services across any number of servers. We’ll treat all servers as one server farm and deploy containers not to predefined locations but to those that have the least number of containers running. Instead of thinking about each server as an individual place where we deploy, we’ll treat all of them as one unit.

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Centralized System and Docker Logging with ELK Stack

With Docker there was not supposed to be a need to store logs in files. We should output information to stdout/stderr and the rest will be taken care by Docker itself. When we need to inspect logs all we are supposed to do is run docker logs [CONTAINER_NAME].

With Docker and ever more popular usage of micro services, number of deployed containers is increasing rapidly. Monitoring logs for each container separately quickly becomes a nightmare. Monitoring few or even ten containers individually is not hard. When that number starts moving towards tens or hundreds, individual logging is unpractical at best. If we add distributed services the situation gets even worst. Not only that we have many containers but they are distributed across many servers.

The solution is to use some kind of centralized logging. Our favourite combination is ELK stack (ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana). However, centralized logging with Docker on large-scale was not a trivial thing to do (until version 1.6 was released). We had a couple of solutions but none of them seemed good enough.
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REST API with JSON

What is REST API?

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. It relies on a stateless, client-server, cacheable communications. In most cases it is used with the HTTP protocol.

RESTful applications use HTTP requests to POST (create), PUT (create and/or update), GET (e.g., make queries), and DELETE data. REST uses HTTP for all four CRUD (Create/Read/Update/Delete) operations.
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Application development: front-end solution with JavaScript

In the previous article we developed the back-end solution for our books application. This article will continue where we stopped.

We’ll develop a front-end solution that can be used with any back-end (Web, mobiles…). You can build on top of the back-end from the previous article (Java, Jersey, Grizzly…) or on top of any other as long as supported services are the same.

The goal of the application is to be able to administer books. In particular, we’ll develop the front-end solution for that application that should be able to:

  • Add new book
  • Update existing book
  • Delete an existing book
  • List all books
  • Display details of the selected book
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Application Development: Back-End Solution With Java

In this article we’ll develop a back-end solution that can be used with any front-end (Web, mobiles…). In the next article we’ll extend on this example and work on the front-end using AngularJS, JQuery and Bootstrap CSS.

The goal of the application is to be able to administer books. In particular, we’ll develop the back-end solution for that application that should be able to:

  • Add new book
  • Update existing book
  • Delete an existing book
  • List all books
  • Display details of the selected book
  • Delete all books
    Continue reading