Docker Inside Your Pipeline Docker has many applications in a modern CI/CD pipeline that make it a natural fit. In particular I use it for build containers and integrations testing. With docker you open up several capabilities that are not normally available to you with CI. First off, you can change your build environment without […]
I recently wrote several blog posts about setting up a DevOps pipeline, and it was working great for our code. However, recently, I ran into an issue. My perfectly written and tested code somehow introduced a bug into our production environment! Luckily, we caught this issue quickly, and it was a relatively easy fix. So, I fixed the code, […]
On our current project, we are using a JBoss application server to host the services that the application needs to function. This application server takes about 1.5 minutes to start. This means that after a developer makes a change to the code, they must wait at least this long (in addition to the amount of […]
Here at Coveros, our accountants were facing significant issues with QuickBooks Premier Professional Services 2015. The initial login process was painfully slow, often taking up to twenty minutes to get a stable login. The software often struggled while switching between single-user mode and multi-user mode (which was done to allow multiple users to access the […]
In the last project I was involved in I needed to establish a connection between a Windows Server 2012 instance in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a physical Synology network-attached storage (NAS). The challenge was that the NAS was located at a remote site and was behind a router. I needed to do this in […]
Some of you may be familiar with the Hippocratic Oath common in the medical field, often paraphrased as “Do no harm.” In a light-hearted casual conversation with a colleague the other day, I realized that we need a similar oath in the field of software development: “Don’t make it worse.”
We ran into a problem on my most recent project with a weird error popping up when installing a wildcard SSL cert into an Apache webserver. We had previously been using a self-signed cert and the Java clients attempting to connect to this site had the old self-signed cert installed into their keystores. Once the […]
One of our clients recently wanted to start using Ansible on a project. As part of the new effort we wanted to investigate Ansible Tower as a potential way to use Ansible. This blog is a overview of the thoughts I had and some lessons learned. My next blog will be more specific examples of […]
Whether you’re setting up a VPN server or establishing SSL certificates for your internal websites, there are a lot of reasons to consider setting up your own certificate authority (CA) for your organization. On my current project, we ran into the former situation and quickly realized the widely recommended default of setting up a separate […]
I’m currently working on a DevOps project, heavily centered around AWS GovCloud. It’s important to point out I’m working in GovCloud, as opposed to AWS, as this means several key tools are missing. My colleague, Alan Crouch, recently pointed out how NAT Gateways are missing from the offered infrastructure. Another tool we found missing was Route 53, […]
