Matt Fisher's Blog

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. … Read More

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. … Read More

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. … Read More

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! … Read More

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. … Read More