My name is Benjamin Cane, and you've landed on my engineering blog. I have a background in distributed systems operations, architecture, and development. You will find articles about all sorts of topics like Docker, Linux, Go, Python, and lots more. I hope you enjoy the blog.
Don't mock Databases, just run them with Docker
Use Docker Compose to create on-demand databases within your local & build environments...
Using stunnel and TinyProxy to obfuscate HTTP traffic
Recently there has been a lot of coverage in both tech and non-tech news outlets about internet privacy and how to prevent snooping both from service providers and governments. In this article I am going to show one method of anonymizing internet traffic; using a TLS enabled HTTP/HTTPS Proxy. In this article we will walk through using stunnel to create a TLS tunnel with an instance of TinyProxy on the other side....
Using salt-ssh to install Salt
In recent articles I covered how I've built a Continuous Delivery pipeline for my blog. These articles talk about using Docker to build a container for my blog, using Travis CI to test and build that container, and finally using a Masterless SaltStack configuration to deploy the blog. Once setup, this pipeline enables me to publish new posts by simply managing them within a GitHub repository. The nice thing about this setup is that not only are blog posts managed hands-free....
Creating a swap file for tiny cloud servers
A few months ago while setting up a few cloud servers to host one of my applications. I started running into an interesting issue while building Docker containers. During the docker build execution my servers ran out of memory causing the Docker build to fail. The servers in question only have about 512MB of RAM and the Docker execution was using the majority of the available memory. My solution to this problem was simple, add a swap file....
Create self-managing servers with Masterless Saltstack Minions
Over the past two articles I've described building a Continuous Delivery pipeline for my blog (the one you are currently reading). The first article covered packaging the blog into a Docker container and the second covered using Travis CI to build the Docker image and perform automated testing against it. While the first two articles covered quite a bit of the CD pipeline there is one piece missing; automating deployment. While there are many infrastructure and application tools for automated deployments I've chosen to use Saltstack....