Kubernetes ConfigMaps are a convenient way to encapsulate configuration values into a named resource and then access those values in your application as environment variables. Creating these resources, however, is typically a manual process, requiring either manually writing YAML or ingesting directories or files containing the values. Today, the most recent version of Environr’s CLI added support for a new output format: kubernetes-configmap. Invoking the CLI tool with the kubernetes-configmap outputter generates a Kubernetes ConfigMap with the same name as the Environr configuration set.
Read more..

Elastic Beanstalk Elastic Beanstalk is Amazon’s answer to the easy management of container-based applications. EB trades functionality like service discovery, cross-node communication, and advanced scheduling for simplicity and ease-of-use. One often overlooked convenience provided by EB is its support for environment variables. Instead of breaking 12-factor app rules by encouraging the storage of environment variables in the repository (dev.yaml, staging.yaml, etc.) or creating workflow problems with a env.yaml per branch, EB does something better: an easily configurable key-value store for each environment you create.
Read more..

As a DevOps architect you hold the responsibility of keeping your tooling as simple as possible for your own benefit as well as others. Simple architectures hold less technical debt, require less cognitive load to understand, and have less moving parts to break. Kubernetes Kubernetes is a powerful open-source container orchestration platform that’s gained a lot of popularity over the past few years and for any non-trivial software projects, it’s a solid investment.
Read more..

Managing secrets in Kubernetes is currently somewhat of a challenge. Kubernetes users have the Secret resource which works well to define secrets in the cluster, but where should secrets reside before they’re added to the cluster? One all-too-common pattern is to encrypt secrets and store them in a git repository for versioning and long-term storage. While this works, and one can argue that a git respository is nothing more than versioned abstract storage, the problem with this approach is not with git itself (or any other DVCS) but with the general use-case of DVCS’.
Read more..

In the chaotic world of software development, a smooth development workflow sometimes seems unattainable. No matter how carefully planned your development cycle is, eventually the time comes when you have your next release ready to ship, but for one reason or another, only part of that release can be deployed. Now you’re faced with splitting up your code and someone else has already committed some new changes for the next release.
Read more..

I’m going to catch a lot of flak for this post, but I think it’s an important statement. In the most common cases, configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Chef encourage bad practices and should be avoided instead of celebrated. The only exception to this is managing an on-premise server fleet that can’t leverage software like Kubernetes, CoreOS, Apache Mesos or emulate an Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform like AWS or GCP.
Read more..

Love them or hate them, with the right feature set, it’s hard to deny that IDEs can make software development a lot more efficient. Text editors like vim, SublimeText, and Atom have plugins that can make software development a lot easier, but they’re typically still limited in scope to what they can do. Don’t get me wrong – I use vim, SublimeText, and Atom on almost a daily basis (some plugins work better in one than the other), but I’m when writing Go code, JetBrains’ new Go IDE, Gogland is surprisingly well done.
Read more..

We have lots of ways to host web applications these days – AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Digital Ocean, Vultr, Heroku, Linode – the list goes on. But as many options as there are, each option comes with its own potential set of challenges. The cheaper VPS options don’t always provide an easy means to scale your application with load balancers, health checks, and autoscaling features. More expensive options like AWS have the means to scale your application, but require a more complicated setup process and cost more money.
Read more..