Friday, Jun 11, 2021
Docker Hub will be [removing Autobuild for free users from June 18th(https://www.docker.com/blog/changes-to-docker-hub-autobuilds/)]. I have recently (about 3 weeks) transitioned away from Autobuild for my biggest container project (Docker Ansible) and actually have been nicely surprised that building with GitLab has resulted in build completing quicker and with better error handling.
It does seem a bit of another end of an era for Docker Hub as initially, I used it for all of my container builds. I guess maybe we can’t have nice things because of crypto miners.
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Wednesday, Jun 9, 2021
I have had a lot of discussion over the past couple of days over what it means that HashiCorp Terraform is now at a v1.0 release. In summary, I think it suggests at the maturity of the tool, which is something I have seen with businesses onboarding Terraform, it is hard to make a guess as to when long terms support for systems will continue, especially for everyone who remembers the v0.11 -> v0.12 migration.
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Tuesday, Jan 21, 2020
I have discussed this slightly before, however, some background may be necessary. I build a relatively well used Docker container with Ansible. Originally this was all based on Python 2 which was the default Python that is installed with most operating systems. However, this was soon to change!
Python 2.7 will reach the end of its life on January 1st, 2020 The longer message that read out when installing using Python 2 was:
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Sunday, Jan 12, 2020
The end of the year is a great time for evaluation and retrospection; and the end of the decade is the same. It often seems that time passes slowly and changes pass quickly but it is probably the opposite. Personally, I have seen a lot of changes over the past 10 years both personally and within work and this post is an effort to evaluate and understand them.
Marriage and Children How could I start without mentioning that within the past 10 years I have gotten married and had 2 children. Anyone who thinks that marriage and children will not change them, frankly is either lying to themselves, or drastically underappreciating life change. I could not think of another event that has changed my life so dramatically as having children. They literally stop your life and alter it.
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Wednesday, Nov 6, 2019
As you may already know I run a relatively successful (in pull terms) Docker container for Ansible; willhallonline/ansible. It has had around 2 million pulls at the moment, and I use it not only for Ansible in my local machine, but also for loading Ansible into various CI systems and testing the deployment of Ansible roles and playbooks.
However, I was prompted to think of the future of it by this GitHub issue opened python 2.7 reaches end of life in 2 months.
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Monday, Oct 28, 2019
Normally, I try to write expressionate things inside my blog, about certain things I have worked on or found interesting. However, this is more to share that I was interviewed by digitalanarchist.com for DevOps.com whilst at GitLab Commit in London.
Overall, I found the interview really interesting. I talked about HeleCloud, what the role of DevOps does and a whole bunch about why I think GitLab is a great tool and how easy it is to actually deploy GitLab pages files, with all the bells and whistles of any Static site, but with almost no configuration.
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Wednesday, Apr 10, 2019
Increasing disk space on the fly inside AWS is a joy to do (kind of). Especially compared to the challenges with bare-metal or on premise systems.
Understanding the Disks When working with disks, it is a good idea to have some idea how they work. Normally you would have a set of disks defined in you /dev system (for devices) and you should be able to see these added externally.
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Friday, Mar 8, 2019
Scaffolding or structuring your Ansible projects mean that not only do you have a sane way understanding how your projects are put together but you can also look at being able to re-use and extend your DevOps projects. I have also created a project here that you could clone (or download) and reuse as you choose https://gitlab.com/willhallonline/ansible-starter.
In the below example I share the tree structure of general Ansible projects and how I use .gitmodules to pull in community and internal roles for managing projects.
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Tuesday, Mar 5, 2019
When working with projects that have dependencies on other projects using git submodules can be really useful. It allows you to basically add links to other git projects inside your source code, without having to add all of the code of the project until you need it.
However, managing those git submodules (from .gitmodules) can prove to be a challenge. I reguarly ship software projects to new developers with multiple submodule and this handy little script will open each of the submodule exactly where you want them without having to use multiple git submodule add... commands.
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Friday, Jan 11, 2019
There has been a tweet doing the rounds about how people are doing with managing their RAM. Generally speaking I have a couple of machines, varying from 4-16GB or RAM. As you can expect I don’t have many spare GB of RAM knocking about, pretty much ever.
ps aux | awk '{print $6/1024 " MB\t\t" $11}' | sort -rn | head -10 593.508 MB /usr/lib/slack/slack 528.391 MB /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 491.52 MB /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 416.336 MB /opt/brave.com/brave/brave 388.254 MB /usr/bin/gnome-shell 339.266 MB /usr/lib/firefox/firefox 337.309 MB /opt/brave.com/brave/brave 301.047 MB /usr/lib/slack/slack 249.516 MB /opt/brave.com/brave/brave Oh Slack… The email killer? Well you are also the largest consumer of my RAM. Do you need a whole GB for messaging? As you can also see, I run both Brave Browser (which is excellent and you should probably also use) and Firefox (which is pretty solid and separate enough from Brave/Chromium/Chrome to provide a nicer distraction).
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