Tag Archives: etcd

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

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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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The 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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Continuous Deployment: Implementation with Ansible and Docker

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

The previous article described several ways to implement Continuous Deployment. Specifically, it described, among other things, how to implement it using Docker to deploy applications as containers and nginx for reverse proxy necessary for successful utilization of blue-green deployment technique. All that was running on top of CoreOS, operating system specifically designed for running Docker containers.

In this article we’ll try to do the same process using Ansible (an open-source platform for configuring and managing computers). Instead of CoreOS, we’ll be using Ubuntu.

Source code used in this article can be found in the GitHub repo vfarcic/provisioning (directory ansible).
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Continuous Deployment: Implementation

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This article is part of the Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment series.

The previous article described several Continuous Deployment strategies. In this one we will attempt to provide one possible solution for reliable, fast and automatic continuous deployment with ability to test new releases before they become available to general users. If something goes wrong we should be able to rollback back easily. On top of that, we’ll try to accomplish zero-downtime. No matter how many times we deploy our applications, there should never be a single moment when they are not operational.
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