Posts on Technology

Contents

Creating Immutable yet Configurable Docker Images

Published: 07 September 2018
Categories: devops, containerization

One challenge when creating Dockerized apps is:

How do you create images that retain their immutability while remaining configurable across environments?

Creating Custom Ansible Modules for Windows

Published: 29 August 2018
Categories: devops, provisioning

Although Ansible has great support overall, it still comes up lacking when you try to do “cutting edge” work, especially around Windows.

In recent times, I have been working a lot with Windows Server. I felt the need to create my own custom modules to get certain things to work, and this was quite an interesting experience. So here’s my brain dump.

Visualizing Prometheus Metrics for Spring Boot Apps with Grafana

Published: 28 August 2018
Categories: devops, monitoring

Spring Boot Dashboard for Grafana: https://grafana.com/dashboards/6756

Import the Dashboard into Grafana:

image

Make some fake requests to Petclinic:

$ while true; do curl -X GET http://some.ip.address:9080/owners?lastName=; sleep 1; done

Watch the trace show up in Grafana!

image

Monitoring Containerized Spring Boot Applications with Prometheus

Published: 26 August 2018
Categories: devops, monitoring

This article discusses integrating a Spring-Boot 2.x Java app with Prometheus. The app in question needs to already be instrumented with the Prometheus libraries.

As discussed in a previous post,, Petclinic has been instrumented to provide Prometheus metrics at a /manage/prometheus endpoint.

In this article we will run the instrumented Petclinic application as a Docker container. We will then run a Prometheus service (again as a Docker container) retrieve metrics from the Spring-Boot app to display in the Prometheus dashboard.

Read more after the break.

Instrumenting Spring Boot Applications for Prometheus Monitoring

Published: 24 August 2018
Categories: devops, monitoring

This post talks about instrumenting a sample Spring-Boot 2.0 application with Prometheus. The motivation to write this post came from my experiments toward creating an instrumented, Dockerized Spring-Boot app that would generate metrics to be consumed by Prometheus and Grafana. Read more after the break.

Integrating Jenkins Pipeline with Docker

Published: 20 August 2018
Categories: devops, software

Foo! Excerpt

Disposable Sharepoint Farm Infrastructure

Published: 20 February 2018
Categories:

Disposable SharePoint Farm Infrastructure

Project Goals

Our 5-member team was deployed to our client’s site with the brief to design, implement and deliver a fully-automated SharePoint Server Farm on Azure.

Infrastructure-as-Code was a key deliverable, i.e. the following tasks were fully automated:

  1. Networks Provisioning
  2. Provisioning of all VMs, Disks, NICs, Security Groups and related resources in Azure
  3. Configuring SQL Server Databases and High Availability
  4. SharePoint Services and Web-Apps Configuration
  5. Configuration of firewall rules for Barracuda WAF and Azure Traffic Manager
  6. Infrastructure Validation against compliance requirements.

Context

Tools Used

TeamCityAnsible Inspec Octopus

Azure PowerShell DSC SharePoint 2016 SQL Server 2016

Key Activities

Drove Recruiting

The team was hired and upskilled in anticipation of this project. As a senior team-member, I helped drive the recruiting, interviewing and upskilling activities. Given that Agility Roots was a new firm, I also created a bespoke interviewing process and programming assignment to help narrow down the most suitable candidates.

Upskilled the Team

Once the team was recruited and in place, I identified gaps in their skillsets and conducted weekend hacking sessions to upskill the team, as well as build camaraderie. This went a long way toward our collective success in delivering a complex project.

Key Impact

Devops Vision Strategy

Published: 25 September 2017
Categories:

DevOps Vision and Strategy for a major Healthcare Enterprise

Project Goals

The role of my team was to work with key stakeholders in the client’s ODC to:

Tools Used

Key Impact

I delivered an end-to-end DevOps Vision and implementation strategy for the client. Where feasible, I also drove the initial implementation of a solution to help evangelize the strategy.

Key aspects of the strategy:

  1. Pipeline-as-Code and the application of Continuous Delivery practices
  2. An effective, decoupled, container-first application architecture
  3. A tightly integrated Deployment Pipeline that enabled realization of DevOps principles of flow and feedback
  4. Infrastructure maintained through, and extended by, Code
  5. Continuous Testing strategies for source-code, container validation and configuration scripts.

Devops Automation And Infra Support

Published: 15 September 2016
Categories:

DevOps Automation Implementation and Infrastructure Support

Project Goals

Tools Used

Key Activities

  1. Injected DevOps practices to complement existing processes to accelerate deployment processes.
  2. Coordinated release processes across teams for multiple releases till production.
  3. Key Stakeholder in the account for accelerating application delivery using DevOps automation and processes:
  4. Automated Environment Provisioning
  5. Automated Provisioners for DevOps ToolStack
  6. Migration to Jenkins Pipeline DSL to support CD principles
  7. Git Migration - Branching and Merging Strategies
  8. Transformation to CI/CD practices for application and automation code
  9. Containerized application development with Docker
  10. Conducted Knowledge sessions on DevOps tools/processes for the account.

Key Impact