Last time I covered several tips on how to launch and operate a Drone CI installation. As promised, I will now reveal my hard-earned secrets on how to build, configure, and monitor DroneCI pipelines!
This assumes pipelines using the Docker runner which is the common use case (and the most useful!)
Yes, this is implicit with the use of the Docker runner, however, take a...
In a previous post, I explored why Jenkins should no longer be the default choice for CI/CD for new software projects. This time, let’s discuss an alternative that I’ve gotten quite familiar with recently: Drone CI.
Drone is simply described as a ‘self-service Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams’. Configuring a CI pipeline is as simple as activating the repo in the web UI and committing a .drone.yml file in the project’s...
Configuration management is an essential competency when running production systems. It enables you to define the intended state of your servers as code rather than through manual effort- saving a lot of time in the process.
Throughout my career, I’ve used Ruby-based configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef- however recently I have started to use Ansible for client projects.
Ansible is accessible to newcomers as:
Jenkins is an ‘open source automation server’ commonly used for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery of software projects by many tech companies. It was first released in 2005 when it was originally known as Hudson. Its large collection of available plugins (~1800!), particularly Pipeline, enables teams to automate common operations tasks, particularly building, testing, and releasing.
All of that being said: it’s time to consider alternatives, especially for new software projects. This article outlines the...
I’m starting a new series where I share my experiences exploring cloud-native/platform engineering tools and technologies. starting with building the foundation: a Kubernetes installation in the cloud.
Why am I doing this?
Today’s mission: get a simple Kubernetes cluster online in the cloud, using infrastructure-as-code! Since I’m an...
When operating large-scale production systems, we rely on infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to keep the state of servers and cloud resources consistent over time. We also benefit from observability platforms to automatically gather metrics from these resources.
However, there are times when both of these essential mechanisms are rendered ineffective during a production incident. How can an engineer troubleshoot and implement a fix successfully across a large number of hosts?
Enter the parallel distributed shell.
A parallel...
I want to introduce one of the most powerful techniques in our arsenal when supporting production systems: system call tracing. But first: what is a system call?
Simply put, system calls are how programs interact with the operating system to request and manage resources like memory, files, network sockets, and hardware devices.
System call tracing allows you to observe the behavior of running processes and how they use those resources in real time.
Why is...
I believe we’re entering a golden age of observability- we can gather metrics from our applications and infrastructure, better interpret them with query languages and pretty dashboards, and get notifications in chatrooms and our oncall systems. All of this technology at our fingertips- without any software licensing fees!
The challenge I see with these new tools is that they tend to assume ‘cloud-native’ infrastructure- the happy path for setup and configuration usually requires a container...