
March 27, 2018
UPDATE: I’ve then written another post to clarify better my point of view on the future of containers.
When I hear people (and usually those people are salespeople) saying that as soon as you put a Container Platform in your company, all your problems go away, I feel bad for the company they are trying to sell it to.
I’ve seen far too many container platforms (as well as many other technologies) fail at customers because they have been sold as this magical problem that makes all your problems go away.
There are many reasons why a container platform could fail in a specific environment. The main reasons in my opinion are:
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February 4, 2018 - Bruxelles, BE
This year, as it has happened for the last few years, I’ve been at FOSDEM.
As always I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and that’s why I continue to go there, and every time I have to suggest other people which events to attend in Europe, I always mention FOSDEM as the principal event.
This year, differently from previous editions, I tried to stick to a single room during Saturday (the Go one).
Being in the same room for the whole Saturday allowed me to follow more talks (no time wasted moving from a room to another and less sitting problems :D) which was convenient since I wanted to follow all talks in that room anyway.
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January 5, 2018
I found myself multiple times in situations where people were trying to explain to me how much they are (or would like to be) DevOps and how awesome DevOps is and how productive their teams had become since when they merged the Dev team and the Ops team, and they don’t have any team which is not DevOps and application-centric.
I usually stare at them thinking that they have no idea what they are talking about, or they have just outsourced all the non-application-centric side of their IT and have not realized it.
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December 21, 2017
A few months ago, I posted how to create a PKI in Go.
Today I’d like to add share a useful function (at least from my point of view) that I found myself to write.
The problem arose when I had a function that required as input a *pem.Block
of the public key, but all I had was the PEM file containing, as you can imagine:
- the Private Key
- the Public Key
- the CA Public Key
I think this is a typical situation, and for this, I’d like to share a function I wrote to extract it.
I know that it’s probably not perfect, but it could be a good starting point for many of you, and if you have suggestions, please leave a comment down below or send me an email, and I’ll update the post!
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July 26, 2017
A lot of times during my job I found myself with the need of Ansible Tower testing environments.
In the last few weeks I created a Vagrant script to actually automate it.
As this is a single host installation, which is usually more than enough for the majority of tests I do, the Vagrant file is very easy:
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
# Set machine size
config.vm.provider :libvirt do |domain|
domain.memory = 2048
domain.cpus = 1
end
# Tower/PgSQL machine
config.vm.define "tower" do |tower|
tower.vm.box = "centos/7"
end
# Ansible Tower configuration
config.vm.provision "ansible" do |ansible|
ansible.playbook = "playbook.yaml"
end
end
I basically create a 2Gb of RAM machine leveraging libvirt and run an Ansible Playbook on it.
The reason I created a 2Gb of RAM machine and I’ve not tried to shrink it further is because the Ansible Tower installation checks for 2Gb of RAM, and I wanted to create something easy.
I’m sure I could patch the installer to accept a 1Gb machine, but it’s not worth the effort to me. Also, in my usual usage of the computer I rarely go below 11Gb free memory, so I’m not too concerned in giving 2Gb to my VM.
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June 5, 2017
Lately I have been programming quite a bit and - for the first time - I have used Golang doing so.
Go is a very nice language and really helped me with the development.
One of the reasons why I have enjoyed this much Go is the standard library, which is amazing.
I would like to share today the easiness of creating a basic Certificate Authority and signed certificates in Go.
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April 26, 2017
After many years of using Hetzner as a server provider, and having rented from them multiple servers for many reasons, I decided to rent a server with 128Gb of RAM to do some tests with many (virtualized) machines on top of CentOS.
As it often happens, hosting providers put in place a lot of security measurements that sometimes make doing simple stuff more complex.
The first approach I tried was using the (only) Ethernet interface as a bridged interface, but that did not brought me very far.
Speaking with the support they pointed out that it was impossible in my setup, so I moved to the second option: the broute.
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March 21, 2017
Sometimes I need to do some tests which are destructive and I need to perform them over and over until I figure out a process that reliably brings me to a desired state.
I usually create some kind of easy to provision environments and work on it.
In the last few weeks I found myself working on an etcd cluster, so I created an environment with Vagrant, and since I had to write the majority of this by myself, since I have not found anything on Google that suited my needs, I’m going to share this with you.
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February 5, 2017 - Bruxelles, BE
FOSDEM is a must for all open source enthusiast in Europe and close by.
I think that the reasons to go to FOSDEM are different from the reasons of many other conferences, but equally valid.
The comparison with DevConf is obvious, due to the temporal closeness of the two events.
I think that DevConf is more about enterprise grade software (or close to be), while FOSDEM is more about experimentations and community.
The causes for this are probably obvious if you consider that DevConf is mainly sponsored by Red Hat, while FOSDEM is completely community driven.
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January 29, 2017 - Brno, CZ
I think this is a special moment of the year, where in less than two weeks is possible to meet a huge amount of Open Source contributors in person.
Obviously you will need to take few flights, but it’s definitely worth.
DevConf this year was great.
I’ve been able to assist to a huge amount of talks (more than 20) and the majority of which were very interesting.
As always in conferences, there are themes heavily discussed and other completely absent.
This year at DevConf (like in many others conferences) containers are a very big topic.
The other big topic (related, but different) was Modularization, an approach Fedora is trying to
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