Working with Containers

With containers, packaging and deploying workloads in a reproducible way has enabled a radically more simple and efficient way to manage applications in production. Containers are lightweight, portable, and scalable, making them an ideal choice for modern cloud-native applications. In this collection, we explore the best practices for using containers in production, from building and pushing Docker images to deploying container workloads on managed services like AWS ECS and Anzu.

Improving Local Development with Atlas

If you’ve worked on a product that depends on multiple services and surrounding cloud resources, you’ve probably wondered about the best way to set things up for local development. Most teams default to the good old Docker Compose setup supported by some scripts, and that works until you run into the limits of a static configuration....Systems Architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC)

Running untrusted code in short-lived environments for Anzu v1

This post is part of the Behind the Scenes series on building the first iteration of Anzu. While we’re working hard on the upcoming iteration, I felt it would be useful to look back on the achievements and downsides of the first version of our product. If you didn’t get to read my previous post discussing the problem statement we intended to solve, check it out....Anzu, Systems Architecture

Deploying Containers on AWS ECS Using the SDK

When building the first iteration of the AWS provider for Anzu, I wanted to provide an easy way to deploy containers on AWS ECS. While newer versions of the provider offer low-level resources, back then I believed that one resource could deploy all related dependencies as well....Containers, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Running Container Workloads on Anzu with Managed Containers

While some projects require complex setups and resources from different cloud providers, sometimes you just want to run a container in the cloud and we hear you!...Anzu, Systems Architecture, Automation

Deploying Docker Containers over SSH

In almost forgotten times, we used to deploy our services to virtual machines by tunneling into the machine, downloading the latest code or image, and running the workload manually. Mostly, this deployment model has been superseded by more automated solutions like hosted container services and PaaS products, but the appeal of simply deploying your app to a remote machine hasn’t completely faded....Containers

Routing Traffic for Dynamic Deployments using Traefik

Whenever I needed to route traffic to one of my side project deployments, I typically chose nginx in the past. I knew the setup process, including requesting certificates using an ACME client like Certbot with LetsEncrypt. Over time, however, adding new deployments started getting tedious....Systems Architecture

Building and pushing Docker images within GitHub Actions

Building and pushing Docker images is one of the most common tasks in the deployment pipeline of most engineering teams. We usually want to build the images ahead of time to create a repository of images we can use for our deployments, or are required to do so in case of serverless deployments where you just supply your image tag....Automation, CI/CD, GitHub Actions

Running Untrusted Workloads with Firecracker and containerd

Firecracker was designed by AWS to run untrusted workloads in a secure environment for their Lambda and Fargate services while retaining the fast startup times and low resource overhead you expect from serverless functions and containers. Represented as microVMs, workloads deployed with Firecracker are extremely lightweight, so that a given host system can run thousands of multi-tenant VMs at a time....Containers

Containers as Code with Pulumi and Docker

In my recent post, I talked about how we reduced deployment times of our Infrastructure-as-Code workflow with Pulumi. The benefits of managing all resources you're deploying in a declarative way are manifold, including observability of what you're running, security in the sense of using encrypted secrets, and composability as all big providers are supported out of the box and you can even write your own additions if needed....Systems Architecture, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), Automation, Pulumi, Terraform, Containers

Solving the unexecutable executable

Sometimes when building software, I run into problems that are extremely weird to grasp, and usually connected to something much more simple that wasn't immediately obvious. I think we often deal with small frustrations and once we have a fix, we move on, ignoring the educational value: Let me raise the recent case of a Docker container failing to launch a built binary....Golang, Containers

The End of an Era for Public Container Image Registries

With the recent changes made to the Docker Terms of Service, image pulls from Docker Hub issues by unauthorized clients and users of the free pricing tier will be rate-limited. This essentially means you can perform 100 (or 200) pulls every 6 hours, after which you'll receive rate-limiting errors....Containers

Empowering CI/CD workflows with compose-deploy

A few days ago, I published my introductory post on a freshly-released tool called compose-deploy, which can be used to deploy your Docker Compose application to a group of deployment targets using nothing more than ssh and built-in Docker (and Docker Compose) features. Since then, I have tried to think of additional situations where you might have to deploy your application that way and benefit from the ease of using this tool, quickly noticing that support for CI-like environments would be hugely beneficial to the purpose of compose-deploy. This is exactly the reason why I'm writing this blog post, to demonstrate how to wire up your CircleCI setup to automatically deploy your application to one or more servers of choice once you push some code to GitHub (or git remote of choice). In general, CI support is relatively trivial, however, I needed to add some minor updates to get to a point where deployments actually work. Let's just jump right into it....Open-Source, Automation, CI/CD, Docker, Containers

Simplifying Docker deployments with compose-deploy

When developing dockerized applications, you might stumble upon the sheer difficulty and annoyance of simply deploying your Compose file along with built service images. If you're not using a full cloud setup and instead want to deploy to a small number of machines, you're left with doing it manually or going for complete automation. At least that was the case until now - I'm happy to introduce compose-deploy. As the name suggests, it is a simple CLI tool that helps you with defining and running your deployments with ease....Open-Source, Automation, CI/CD, Docker, Containers, Release