I came across this post in a slack channel earlier today and thought it was some pretty sound advice for those starting out in the container eco system. First: Containers are immutable – The OS, library versions, configurations, folders, and application are all wrapped inside the container. You guarantee that the same image that was tested in QA will reach the production environment with the same behaviour. Second: Containers are lightweight – The memory footprint of a container is small. ... Read more

Reading is definitely a passion for me. I love reading every chance I get. So few books have stuck with me or have become even a flavor of the week that I feel like I have to recommend Greg McKeown’s Essentialism again. I came by another post, not long after reading Greg’s book, talking about priorities and the nonsense it creates. The Myth of Multitasking Yes, we are capable of doing two things at the same time. ... Read more

Yeah you saw that right. This new Microsoft confuses me almost on a daily basis. Part of me thinks that this is awesome, and then another part yells at me for thinking it is awesome. I think it is great that Microsoft is looking to make good with the open-source community. They are the second largest contributor to Docker outside of Docker, and now this push to put SQL Server on Linux is yet another attempt to break bread. ... Read more

I don’t typically subscribe to books about decision-making or “life hacking” or even time management. I just finished my second read of Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I read through it the first time, and I was skeptical. After my second read, I can say I am a believer. I can’t recommend this book enough. I have had trouble divorcing myself from work for a while. I would always be the guy saying; ... Read more

To go along with a talk I am doing this week, I created a demo project to reinforce the idea behind ephemeral architecture and infrastructure as code. We create two S3 buckets for the purpose of intake and another to serve out a static site we will be generating using ECS. The first bucket is a place to drop photos which then triggers a lambda function, we will call this photo_bucket. ... Read more

After watching @kelseyhightower’s speech at Strangeloop 2015. I was really impressed at the ease of instruction and demonstration he showed. I had not played with Kubernetes aside from using the kube-up.sh script in the github repo with the EC2 provider. He starts off the talk by saying: > How would you design your infrastructure if you could never login? I have worked with clients and have said these exact words. It immediately grabbed my attention. ... Read more

This was a post I had stashed away a while ago by Vidar Hokstad. He goes into some of the uses he has been seeing/using docker for. I have used some of these and I am sure there are even more development patterns out there now. The one I am most interested in is the ‘installer’ container as he calls it. There are so many installers that come in the form of… ... Read more

So I have been on a bit of a kick with Docker. I have been in Boston talking about it, giving webinars on it, and using it just about everywhere in every which way I can. One of the first things I realized is that I hate installing dependencies on all of my things. Installing ruby, git, gcc, and not to mention all the gems that I need to run. ... Read more

Well it is that time again. AWS re:Invent is right around the corner and I will once again be making the trek to beautiful Las Vegas. I am looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and even more excited to see what new service offerings will be unveiled. Plenty of people from 2ndWatch will be there @ booth # 626 so be sure to swing on by and chat for a bit. ... Read more

Hey Andre, Look at this! Over the past 5 months I have been working on a team of about five people on a shared workstation. Originally I had my reservations about other people working on the same machine as everyone else, but was quickly swaying to use it myself. Rather than set everyone up on their windows laptops (which I still think is a huge barrier for entry) our workstation was originally set up to help other people start coding, developing, and learning ruby. ... Read more