Hosting a Static Website for $0.01

This guide is a follow-up from my original tutorial. I’ve updated my blog to Azure’s new infrastructure over a year ago. This site currently receives about 12,000 page views per month. In my previous tutorial, it cost about $0.20 per month to handle storage and bandwidth costs. But for the last 12 months, it cost me $0.01 per month to keep this site running. $0.05 for storage, and $0.07 for bandwidth. … »

Distributing with Distribution: Upcoming Changes to Helm Chart Repositories

Further reading: Steve Lasker also wrote a similar blog post on container registries here. Helm Chart Repositories were deisgned to store, share and distribute Helm Charts. After the last Helm Summit, members from Microsoft Azure, Codefresh, Quay and others from the Helm Community have been advocating for a new standard so that Chart Repositories can scale to meet the demands of the broader Helm community. If we take a look at the broader Cloud Native ecosystem, Docker’s Distribution project checks off many of the boxes we were looking for in a successor: a battle-hardened, secure and highly reliable service being used in production today. … »

Blogging for Pennies on Azure

I’m an absolute sucker for free (or at least incredibly cheap) stuff. If you’re reading this, you probably are too. As a semi-recent hire at Microsoft, one of the employee perks is an Azure subscription with a monthly quota worth $150USD. For Canadians, that translates to $190CAD per month. While that is plenty enough to host a few websites on several fairly beefy VMs, why not optimize costs and host for as little as $0. … »

Deis on DigitalOcean

Deploying applications to web servers on your own infrastructure these days has never been easier. Gone are the days of having to manually install packages, run bootstrapping scripts, replicate production environments, and document the entire process so that you can successfully run the same job at 3AM because your application went down. Thanks to new emerging technologies like Configuration Management tools, Platform as a Service layers, and the push for companies to adopt a DevOps approach to their solutions, IT orchestration and application management got a hell of a lot easier. … »

deis-bot's many one-liners

Some hilarious one-liners from deis-bot, a buildbot that sits in #deis on IRC: <gabrtv> deis-bot: if you bitch about db schema changes you're gonna make me upset <deis-bot> gabrtv: if you need to reprovision your controllers <gabrtv> that's a good point, but i tested it and the schema migration is backwards compatible w/ my existing controller <deis-bot> build #261 of deis is complete: Success [build successful] Build details are at http://buildbot. … »

Why DevOps, and why PaaS?

When it comes to deployments, there has been a recent push for rapid release cycles, resource orchestration, application scalability, product delivery, and quality testing. IT Administrators and Software Developers need to be able to improve collaboration and communication. This mindset is often referred to as DevOps, a term used for integrating both software development and IT together. DevOps can mean different things for different groups. Software Developers who really try to adopt a DevOps state of mind tend to stumble towards automated application deployment tools that provide application monitoring, scaling, and automated builds like Heroku, Windows Azure, or Google App Engine. … »

I heard you like Tetris...

So why not play tetris inside Stackato, or any other server that allows you to tunnel via SSH? Now you can, thanks to the help of Mathias Buus who created a program that will let you play tetris in full colour in your terminal window. Most of my time at ActiveState HQ is spent on getting open source applications like tetris or docker’s internal registry ‘stackatofied’. We choose applications that are new and exciting or that demonstrate deploying an application in some way. … »

Working with Multiple Dockerfiles

Dockerfiles are a simplistic way to create a repeatable workflow for creating Docker images. Creating a description file, called a ‘Dockerfile’, will enable you to build these images. When you’ve created the Dockerfile that you want to save, you can do so by running ‘docker build .’. But what if you want to have multiple Dockerfiles in one folder (eg. so you can deploy multiple docker images)? Currently, ‘docker build’ cannot read from a file. … »

How to create your own Custom Service in Stackato

Services are essential for cloud-enabled applications and therefore core to Stackato. Whether it’s relational database services like PostgreSQL, message queueing services like RabbitMQ, NoSQL data stores like MongoDB, or caching with memcached, our devs have worked out how to get popular services integrated with Stackato, and the default services have been great for almost every application. But what if you wanted to rely on your own custom service? Hopefully, by the end of this post, you’ll understand how services work in Stackato, how they’re provisioned, and how to make your own custom service plugin for Stackato! … »

Blog Deployment Workfow using Nginx, Jekyll, and git post-receive Hooks

This blog post shows how I set up a remote repository on my deployment server for making blog deployments as easy as git push deploy master. This website lives within a git repository on my private git site, and it was made using jekyll. Prerequisites There are a couple things that are required before you start this tutorial. You must have: access to a private server for hosting your site (if it’s just for testing purposes, a laptop or computer will do) basic knowledge of git. … »