cloud

Hetzner has always been a reliable and cost-effective hosting company for me for several years. I’ve run icanhazip.com on their dedicated servers and I run several small applications in their cloud. When I run containers, I love using Fedora CoreOS for its easy updates and very small server footprint. Almost everything you need for hosting containers is provided right out of the box, but you can add extra packages via rpm-ostree layers and reboot to use them....

GitHub Actions provides infrastructure for all kinds of amazing automation. Anyone can test software, build packages, deploy applications, or even publish a blog (like this one!) with a few snippets of YAML. I often use it to bundle my software in a container after testing it. 🤖 One day, as I was working through another Packer configuration, I wondered if there was a way to build cloud images directly in GitHub Actions without building an instance in the cloud, making tons of changes, and snapshotting that image....

The AMIs provided by most Linux distributions in AWS work well for most use cases. However, there are those times when you need a customized image to support a certain configuration or to speed up CI processes. You can get a customized image via a few methods: Build from an existing AMI, customize it, and snapshot it. Use an automated tool, such as Packer, to automate #1. Build your own image locally in KVM, VMware, or Virtualbox and upload the image into S3, import it into an EC2, and create an AMI from the snapshot....

Fedora 30 is my primary operating system for desktops and servers, so I usually try to take it everywhere I go. I was recently doing some benchmarking for kernel compiles on different cloud plaforms and I noticed that Fedora isn’t included in Google Compute Engine’s default list of operating system images. (Note: Fedora does include links to quick start an Amazon EC2 instance with their pre-built AMI’s. They are superb!)...

Walt Disney said it best: We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. The world of technology is all about change. We tear down the old things that get in our way and we build new technology that takes us to new heights. Tearing down these old things can often be difficult and that forces us to make difficult choices....

NOTE: The opinions shared in this post are mine alone and are not related to my employer in any way. The first OpenStack Project Teams Gathering (PTG) event was held this week in Atlanta. The week was broken into two parts: cross-project work on Monday and Tuesday, and individual projects Wednesday through Friday. I was there for the first two days and heard a few discussions that started the same way....

I was shocked to see Robyn Bergeron’s email today about Seth Vidal’s passing. He was the victim of a hit and run accident while he was cycling last night. The suspect has turned himself in as of tonight. I first met Seth at FUDCon Tempe back in 2011. We had talked off and on via email and IRC about cloud-related topics. He was interested in how we assembled our cloud offering at Rackspace and I was eager to talk to him about building cloud images and handling mirrors....

Wednesday was action-packed with dramatic keynotes and great sessions. The morning was kicked off by Paul Cormier and he talked about some new products coming from Red Hat. Much of the product releases were centered around cloud offerings (like Openshift) and his talk was mainly aimed at CIO’s and decision makers. There wasn’t a lot of technical detail within his talk but it was refreshing to hear a Linux vendor talk about their products as being revolutionary steps in pulling away from vendor lock-in and proprietary solutions....

The Red Hat Summit 2012 kicked off with an evening keynote by Jim Whitehurst explaining the changes in business value over time from the raw materials to the industry that profited from standardization. He made some excellent points and summaries about what cloud is and isn’t. The root of his keynote was around what cloud can do for companies and not so much about what cloud really is. His key point was that the value didn’t reside in the nuts and bolts that hold a cloud together....

My work at Rackspace has changed a bit in the last few weeks and I’ve shifted from managing a team of engineers to a full technical focus on OpenStack Nova. Although it was difficult to leave my management position, I’m happy to get back to my roots and dig into the technical stuff again. One of the first things I wanted to tackle was understanding how a build request flows through Nova to a XenServer hypervisor....