In my last post I talked about making your application containers more portable in regards to logging. The way my team ended up doing this was by shipping a container along with our application container that served as a data container to mount application logs to and having Logstash run in that container with application logs as the input. I mentioned in the previous post that I had found adding as much information to the logs as you can at the source will alleviate problems later. After having…

In the past couple years, the way we think about our infrastructure has undergone a makeover. Without a doubt, the biggest shift in operations and infrastructure has been towards containers. As a result, we’ve been forced to question the way we do infrastructure. Before containers, you’re “deliverable” was the application itself. Your configuration management tools would provision your host to be able to run that application. With containers, you’re…

For some time now, I have wanted to apply configuration management to my blog. It’s been about a year since I first stood up my blog. I began with a cloud server, Nginx, and a static HTML page. From there, I graduated to a Python application with Postgres. The next obvious choice was to shim everything into Docker containers (yes, I was affected by the Great Container Obsession of 2014-15). During those transitions, I used scripts and text files to make things somewhat repeatable, but they…