Blog

The last few weeks I’m working with Kubernetes and OpenStack. It’s a steep learning curve to get a production-ready Kubernetes Cluster running on OpenStack, especially because I didn’t want to use the available ready-to-use tools. In the next few blog posts, I want to share my experience how to run Kubernetes on an OpenStack platform.

My continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline use Docker containers and a private Docker registry to distribute and deploy my applications automatically. Unfortunately, the Docker command-line tool can’t really control the Docker registry, actually, it is only capable of pushing and pulling image (tags). This is a bit frustrating because, when you’re using your continuous integration pipeline to build containers, push them to the registry, and pull them again to run the QA, the registry will eat up all your disk space due the images are never removed. To clean up your ‘mess’, you have to remove the images manually, but it’s way cooler (and simpler) to use the Docker registry API for this job.

For DevOps engineers like me, command-line tools help me to automate stuff. Rancher provides two CLI tools: rancher and rancher-compose. I use these two tools to automate deployments, upgrades, and cleaning up if environments aren’t in use anymore. Basically, it is possible to completely automate your continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline (but that is something for another blog post!).

Number one challenge when you are using Docker in production environments is storage. On you local development machine it is possible to mount a local directory path into your docker container, but in production environments, this isn’t an option because you don’t know if the path exists and if the docker container is always running on the same node. A solution is NFS, and when using Rancher, Rancher-NFS.

Do you want to use Docker containers in production on a CentOS 7 machine, but you think it is hard? Then have a look at Rancher! Rancher is a container management platform to deploy docker containers in a production environment very easily.

As a developer, I used GitHub a lot to store my (private) projects. This works great, but I do miss the CI integration as done by GitLab. I could use public services like Travis, but they do charge for private projects.

Because we’re using GitLab and GitLab CI at work I wondered how much work it would be to setup my private GitLab server on my Rancher environment. In this blog post, I will share the results with you.

Password strength is a more and more important subject for (web) applications. I guess we have all read at least one time about user accounts got hijacked because the user used a password like ‘1234567890’ and ‘qwerty’. As developer, we can prevent this pretty easy by adding validation on the user password.

At work, I am responsible for version management and releasing software. The process of releasing a new version is always the same: creating a change log, adding this to the documentation and in GIT, update the version number, etc. etc. etc. This set me thinking, can I automate this process? And can I do that with my favorite language PHP? Yes I can, with Robo PHP!

After blogging about my lessons learned on 28 March this year, I have to create a ‘part 2’ because of problems with the static route to the KPN IPTV network. It changes at every reboot which causes a not working IPTV network in-house.

In February 2016, I moved from Ziggo to KPN Fiber because of the higher upload speed and because fiber was available in my new home. I replaced the experiabox with my own hardware which was sometimes challenging. This post is about my lessons learned with KPN Fiber, Router IPTV and the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.