Posts

Trigger Terraform in the cloud with Terraform-deck

For a few weeks now, I've been working on Terraform-deck, an API to kick off Terraform workspaces remotely. I'm using it on a project a for some time and, if it is not easy, I've started to turn it into an open source. It has been a real opportunity. A lot of people I love are supportive and some have already contributed more than I had expected. I'm very grateful. It is a lot of talks, energy and passion!

This first article introduces the tool and shows how you can put an hand on it.
What is Terraform-deck? If you are using Terraform, I don't have to explain its principles... You can spawn or destroy hundreds of resources in a few minutes. If you need to scale and make them more robust, Terraform Enterprise is the way to go: it is serious; it integrates registries to share your code; it manages parameters; it helps enforce policies; it provides a nice and easy UI; it help you integrates your CI/CD pipelines. Plus, it is worth and fair to reward the fantastic peo…
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Monolithic Repository and CI/CD

After working with dozen of independent projects and dealt with the difficulties of sharing components, fighting the technical debt, duplicating parameters from the projects to the infrastructure code or simply helping people to join our teams/projects, we've decided to move towards a monolithic repository... And by this mean, overcoming some of the challenges we had faced, as a start up, to develop and grow a micro-service architecture.

As you can guess, storing different services in a single repository does not come without any challenges either. You want to enforce good practices. You need to optimize your CI/CD pipeline. You need to accelerate and add new people; new teams.

A monolithic repository comes with its own set of questions:
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Scrum Is Killing Me...

Software is eating the world and it is a lot of fun. A lot of fun to work on products that are shaping our future or, at least, to hope and fight for it. It is a lot of fun to work with smart people, enthusiastic people, committed people. It is a hard work too. We do not want to compromise. We fail a lot. We need to stay right-in-time: not early, not late either. We need skilled people, talented people. We need diversity. We need to be part of teams. We need to be involved with a team; remain positive, accept ideas from others, be passionate and tolerant. So it is fun and it is hard! Well, it is especially hard since Scrum is killing me... again!

Lets start with facts I sometimes wonder if people know:
Scrum has been defined and maintained by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland who are 2 distinguished gentlemen. Scrum is documented as a whole in "The Definitive Guide to Scrum: The Rules of the Game" that is available under CC BY-SA that is an OpenSource License. There is no …
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Using Docker with your own Certificate Authority

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You should be able to find several free Certificate Authorities in the wild. The most popular are probably Let's Encrypt or CACert. However, if for any reasons (restrictions, use of localhost, ability to automate...), you prefer to manage your own Certificate Authority, you will probably consider OpenSSL as a nice toolkit to build it. This blog presents a few useful commands. They are not intended, by any mean, to replace the official documentation but it might help to speed-up your initial setup and different scenarios.

If you own a CA, you could use it a lot with Docker... or not. I mean it could help. For instance, you could use it to secure a vault to store and share secrets. You could rely on a PKI to authenticate clients ans servers. You could also use it to encrypt HTTP protocol, including the access to your private registry. This blog will explore the latter scenario to illustrate how you can leverage your newly created Certificate Authority.
Important Note:
The example bel…
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Provisioning Compute in Oracle Public Cloud with Terraform

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Terraform is probably the most popular Cloud orchestrator today. At least, this is the one I prefer! It is easy to use, fast, it provides a nice way to simulate the addition/deletion of resources and it can be extended nicely. It is the perfect tool to kick-off Infrastructure with most providers as I've already discussed.

For a few days now, I've started to use Oracle Cloud again. I'm really enjoying the Container Services, by the way. Beyond the Database, Oracle has definitely made some tremendous progress with its IaaS. It is very powerful. When discovered I could use Terraform with the Compute Service, I could not resist... It took me less than 15 minutes to install it and use Terraform Provider for Oracle Compute Cloud. It just works fine with Terraform 0.8... You will find a few notes about it right below
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Service Discovery and Blue/Green Update with Docker

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If you are a developer, a product owner or a project manager, love docker! It speeds up and eases everything:
It is a perfect match for 12-Factor applications and microservices development. Do you want Agile Management? Do you want to build large applications? Do you want to keep a clear separation of concerns? Do you want to scale your project with "divide and conquer"?Thank to the Docker Hub, Docker Store and Github, it provides a huge amount of images you can easily pull, assemble and enhance to build the best experience to users. It is quite agnostic from your infrastructure or cloud provider. It allows to easily scale-out to handle load. If you are an Ops, you can be even more happy! It is very likely you will get more work and challenges than ever. "Learn as you go", if you want...  Not only you should choose and deploy one of the many Docker Infrastructure from Kubernetes, Mesos/Marathon, Nomad, Swarm or AWS ECS but you will soon discover you need more to ma…
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Deploying Consul on AWS ECS with Terraform

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Consul brings a lot to Docker management. Working with AWS EC2 Container Services (ECS), it has literally changed the game when I've been able to get its magic. Unfortunately there is not so much written on the subject and the only full implementation I did find was based on CloudFormation and did not workout well for me since I was already using Terraform a lot on the project...

I've decided to build and make available a project that embed the whole ECS/Consul stack written with Terraform. It has also been the opportunity to demonstrate some of the good practices I was talking about with Terraform in my last post. I've just made it available on Github.com and I've called the project ECS unleashed for several reasons I don't want to dig too much into for now. Once deployed, the project embeds a simple demonstration of a blue/green application upgrade.

I wish it will help people to adopt Consul, build more advanced demonstration or even use it in production. I hope…
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