containers

Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes

There is plenty of documentation, tutorials, and guides online, explaining Docker containers, Kubernetes container orchestration, and microservices. Here are a few that I found useful for the quick and simple introduction into these technologies and how to tie them together.

Firstly, some basic 101s:

Secondly, “Introduction to Microservices, Docker, and Kubernetes” YouTube video nicely puts all the things together, with complete code and configuration examples, some glue, and extra tips.

And finally, a few bits that you might need to solve on the way, which are not necessarily related, but can throw you off:

Some of the virtualization bits (such as VirtualBox) might fail to run properly if you have Secure Boot enabled. To solve this problem, reboot the machine, go to the BIOS, and disable Secure Boot (enable Legacy Mode).
Additionally, while you are there, check for the Virtualization Technology settings. Enable Virtualization Technology in the BIOS to further smooth out VirtualBox and friends.
While working on your first minikube cluster (sorting out VirtualBox and such), it helps to completely remove and start again, after sorting out any issues that prevent Kubernetes to start (proxy timeouts, etc). A quick “minikube delete && minikube start” will save you some time on troubleshooting weird issues, than just “minikube start” after a failure.

Have fun!

7 ways to do containers on AWS

“7 ways to do containers on AWS” covers a variety of different ways to run containers on the Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure. These include most of the usual suspects, like Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS), and hand-rolled vanilla containers on EC2, as well as a few lesser known ones like templated Kubernetes and Amazon Fargate.

A Practical Introduction to Container Terminology

“A Practical Introduction to Container Terminology” is at the same time two things for me:

The longest blog post that I’ve seen in a long time, if not ever.
The best introductory tutorial into containers.

Strongly recommended.

Slimming down Docker images

It’s been a while since I posted anything about Docker. That’s mostly because I still don’t really use it for anything – playing around locally, testing and learning doesn’t count yet.

But just to keep the ball rolling, here are a couple of handy links for the ideas on how to improve your Docker images, so that Docker uses much less space, benefits more from caching, and brings up the containers faster:

Both articles are around the same theme – choose your base image carefully, try to minimize the layers, use only what you need, and don’t forget to clean up the disk space with “docker system prune“.

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev

Spellbook of Modern Web Dev is a collection of 2,000+ carefully selected links to resources on anything web development related. It covers subjects from Internet history and basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript, all the way to tools, libraries and advanced usage of web technologies, and more; from network protocols and browser compatibility to development environments, containers, and ChatOps.

This document originated from a bunch of most commonly used links and learning resources I sent to every new web developer on our full-stack web development team.

For each problem domain and each technology, I try my best to pick only one or a few links that are most important, typical, common or popular and not outdated, base on the clear trends, public data and empirical observation.

Prefer fine-grained classifications and deep hierarchies over featureless descriptions and distractive comments.

Ideally, each line is a unique category. The ” / “ symbol between the links means they are replaceable. The “, “symbol between the links means they are complementary.

I wish this document could be closer to a kind of knowledge graph or skill tree than a list or a collection.

It currently contains 2000+ links (projects, tools, plugins, services, articles, books, sites, etc.)

On one hand, this is one of the best single resources on the topic of web development that I’ve seen in a very long time. On the other hand, it re-confirms my belief in “there is no such thing as a full-stack web developer”. There’s just too many levels, and there’s too much depth to each level for a single individual to be an expert at. But you get bonus points for trying.