Tag Archives: Configuration Management

Terraform vs. Pulumi vs. Crossplane – Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools Compared

We are comparing Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane. Those are the most popular and the most exciting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools we have on the market today. Which one should you use? What are the pros and cons of each? What are the use cases that make one a better choice over the others?
Continue reading

Advertisement

The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit

Today is an exciting day for me. I just decided that the book I spent the last eight months writing is ready for general public.

What made me write the book? Certainly not the promise of wealth since, as any author of technical books will confirm, there is no money that can compensate the number of hours involved in writing a technical book. The reasons behind this endeavor are of a different nature. I realized that this blog is a great way for me to explore different subjects and share my experience with the community. However, due to the format, blog posts do not give enough space to explore, in more details, subjects I’m passionate about so, around eight months ago, I decided to start working on The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices book. It treats similar subjects as those I write about in this blog, but with much more details. More importantly, the book allowed me to organize my experience into a much more coherent story.

The book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. It’s about fast, reliable and continuous deployments with zero-downtime and ability to roll-back. It’s about scaling to any number of servers, designing self-healing systems capable of recuperation from both hardware and software failures and about centralized logging and monitoring of the cluster.

In other words, this book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. We’ll use Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, Jenkins, and so on. We’ll go through many practices and, even more, tools.

At this moment, around 70% is finished and you’ll receive regular updates if you decide to purchase the book. The truth is that my motivation for writing the book is the same as with this blog. I like sharing my experience and this book is one more way to accomplish that. You can set your own price and if you feel that the minimum amount is still too high, please send me a private message and I’ll get back to you with a free copy.

Please give The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices a try and let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Microservices: The Essential Practices

Before we jump and try to explore the practices we must master in order to successfully implement microservices architecture, let us briefly refresh our understanding of monolithic applications.
Continue reading

The History of Failed Initiatives

I worked with many different clients. From small greenfield projects all the way to big ones in sectors like automotive, lottery, banking, insurance and other industries. With few exceptions teams in those projects can be divided into those that started anew and think that they are using latest and greatest ways to develop and those that are in charge of bigger projects that started long time ago. The later group tends to put to much energy trying to stay afloat that latest and greatest is very low on their list of priorities.
Continue reading

Configuration Management in the Docker World

Anyone managing more than a few servers can confirm that doing such a task manually is a waste of time and risky. Configuration management (CM) exists for a long time and there is no single reason I can think of why one would not use one of the tools. The question is not whether to adopt one of them but which one to choose. Those that already embraced one or the other and invested a lot of time and money will probably argue that the best tool is the one they chose. As things usually go, the choices change over time and the reasons for one over the other might not be the same today as they were yesterday. In most cases, choices are not based on available options but by the architecture of the legacy system we are sworn to maintain. If such systems are to be ignored or someone with enough courage and deep pockets would be willing to modernize them, today’s reality would be dominated by containers and microservices. In such a situation, the choices we made yesterday are definitely different from choices we could make today.
Continue reading