Using CircleCI workflows to deploy to Kubernetes

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

As I have been continuing to work with CircleCI’s new 2.0 beta I started looking at the workflows recently. These are like Pipelines in Jenkins, that allow for a series of build/test/deploy steps that can be done either sequentially or in parallel depending upon your use case. To set up a true Continuous Integration using this, and the new Keubernetes cluster, I set up a new job to deploy to Kubernetes. It took a little time digging through some documentation between both CircleCI and Kubernetes, so I wanted to share my findings. …

Infrastructure Change - Enter CircleCI

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

In my never ending quest to try all the tools, and also to get things as automated as possible, I have recently started playing with CircleCI. I have used Jenkins quite a bit, and it is really the kitchen-sink when it comes to CI with plug-ins and tools for just about everything. But just a few days ago I had a really weird break within Jenkins that was stopping me from deploying new changes. This, plus the fact that one of the engineers at my current gig was showering CicleCI with praise, made me take a second look at it. …

libvirt and Terraform - Finally!

Thursday, June 22, 2017

Some time ago I wrote a post about the unlove that generally befalls libvirt. When I migrated my site over to Hugo I didn’t bring the post along, because it was basically a long winded diatribe about the lack of support in the devops community for libvirt. Although still not officially supported, lots of work has been done to add support to Terraform for using libvirt with the terraform-provider-libvirt project. As of a few weeks ago I got this set up and working, with relative ease I might add, and wanted to share how I got it working. …

My Local Kubernetes Cluster

Friday, May 19, 2017

I’m working on a very large project currently at work that involves Kubernetes. I’ve had quite a bit of time to play with it, and I have been very much enjoying it. Although I run a lot of containerized applications on my local network at home, I have up to this point just been either scheduling the containers by hand, or have been using Rancher as my main scheduler. Honestly though, I have been so impressed with Kubernetes that I finally decided that I should spin up a local cluster for me to use in my homelab. Although it looked pretty straight forward, and really in the end it was, I ran into a number of issues that I wanted to touch on. Two caveats before we get started. First, this is only intended for spinning up Kubernetes on your own VMs, Baremetal, or Linode/Digial Ocean type of boxes. There are way better tools out there if you want to install a cluster in AWS (see Kops). Second, I will be focusing on using CentOS7 as the base operating system. …

My Master Vagrant File

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Vagrant is probably one of my favorite tools. The ability to quickly spin up one, or multiple, virtual machines for testing is super useful. Over the course of the last year or two really using it, I have developed what I call my “master” Vagrantfile. This Vagrantfile essentially has lots of the common things I do, with comments that allow me to easily select the things I want. For instance, options for all the different distributions that I need to test with, whether I want to provision with a shell script or with Ansible, and places for specifying multiple VMs. So I figured I would post my master file here for others to take a look at, use, or even just as a guide. …

New Job, New Infrastructure

Thursday, May 11, 2017

I started a new job a few months ago as a full time DevOps engineer for a non-profit. After doing the large corporate thing for a while, I grew tired of the bureaucracy and the (frankly) bullshit and decided it was time to move back to a smaller team who was more focused on the technology and providing a good service, than focusing on ROI for stockholders. So here I am, it’s been a few months and I couldn’t be happier! I am about to embarq on a very large infrastructure project for this new company, and figured it was time to also update my personal blog so I could chronicle what I’ve learned in the process. Well, updating for me really means starting fresh, all new hosting, all new content. …