Tag Archives: Consul

Docker Flow – Walkthrough

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Docker Flow is a project aimed towards creating an easy to use continuous deployment flow. It depends on Docker Engine, Docker Compose, Consul, and Registrator. Each of those tools is proven to bring value and are recommended for any Docker deployment.

The goal of the project is to add features and processes that are currently missing inside the Docker ecosystem. The project, at the moment, solves the problems of blue-green deployments, relative scaling, and proxy service discovery and reconfiguration. Many additional features will be added soon.

The current list of features is as follows.

Docker Flow: Proxy – On-Demand HAProxy Service Discovery and Reconfiguration

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A lot changed since I published that article. The Swarm as a standalone container is deprecated in favor of Swarm Mode bundled inside Docker Engine 1.12+. On the other hand, the Docker Flow: Proxy advanced and became more feature rich and advanced. I suggest you check out the project README instead this article.

The goal of the Docker Flow: Proxy project is to provide a simple way to reconfigure proxy every time a new service is deployed or when a service is scaled. It does not try to “reinvent the wheel”, but to leverage the existing leaders and combine them through an easy to use integration. It uses HAProxy as a proxy and Consul as service registry. On top of those two, it adds custom logic that allows on-demand reconfiguration of the proxy.
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The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit

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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.

Deploying Containers with Docker Swarm and Docker Networking

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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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Microservices: The Essential Practices

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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.
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Service Discovery: Zookeeper vs etcd vs Consul

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single-node-dockerThe more services we have, the bigger the chance for a conflict to occur if we are using predefined ports. After all, there can be no two services listening on the same port. Managing a tight list of all the ports used by, lets say, hundred services is a challenge in itself. Add to that list the databases those services need and the number grows even more. For that reason we should deploy services without specifying the port and letting Docker assign a random one for us. The only problem is that we need to discover the port number and let others know about it.
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Scaling To Infinity with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 4/4) – Scaling Individual Services

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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

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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

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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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