For the past few years I have been a key game changer in moving my employers into SOA/Microservices architecture. Along with this I have pushed Mesos/Marathon and Docker as the clustering/container technology. I have completely changed the way engineering handles processes to be alignment with automation and continuous delivery of many services.
I had an epiphany when talking to a friend recently… For whatever reason I don’t use any of the above technologies for my personal blogs, websites and open-source projects. Yes, I contribute to the Docker project and have written management tools to handle blue/green deployments but I’m not using them for my own (outside-of-work) coding.
Why you might ask? I guess I was probably too exhausted from working 12+ hour days and leading my existing projects after hours to put the time in. Rackspace is one of my sponsors and along with that I receive a generous cloud credit each month. I’ve been using a fraction of what I could possibly use from them.
When I started evaluating my manual processes in deploy new docker images for my projects, website updates and deployments I realized I’m using up lots of my time that I could of spent just automating everything.
The journey of building my Platform-as-a-Service
I’m about to publish a series related to the start and finish of my personal PaaS. I will be covering complete coverage of:
- Using Ansible to deploy the initial Mesos/Marathon cluster
- Mesos and Marathon Optimizations
- Using Weave with FastDP for private Docker networking and DNS propagation
- Using Depcon with TravisCI to deploy
- Using databases in Docker with persistent volume stores using docker-volume-netshare
- Load balancing across the cluster
- And hopefully much more!
If you’ve wondered how to build a stable, automated platform then keep an eye out each week as start publishing this material.