Configuring an Office JS word add-in with ReactJS without the Yeoman generator

“Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem and a big idea turn into an innovation.”
– Dean Kamen, Inventor of Segway

Deciphering containerd

Ever since the ascent of containers, Docker has been valued as the most preferred container management tool. But as the technology evolved, the industry players realized that there was a need for customization in the Docker architecture to allow vendors to build things their way. The Docker team has been constantly trying to evolve its offerings to make the platform more composable so that individual components can be spun off and used by other vendors developing alternative solutions.

High-Availability Cluster is a group of computers with the purpose of increasing the uptime of services by making sure that a failed machine is automatically and quickly replaced by a different machine with little service disruption.

In this blog, I will explain how you can set up a Jenkins High Availability (HA) cluster using the data replication software DRBD and the cluster manager Heartbeat. In this example, the two machines building the cluster run on Ubuntu 16.04. I will also talk about how to switch between the active and passive machines in case of failover.

Microservices simplified with NGINX app server platform

NGINX, a project started in 2002, is now a company widely appreciated for its open-source web-server platform which is rivaling the likes of Apache and Microsoft. With its position firm in the web-server space and an ever-increasing market share, NGINX is now coming up with an arsenal of enhancements to bolster its application platform technology. A lot of us are moving from monolith to microservices, and NGINX is always encouraging organizations the adoption of microservices architecture.

Most feature-rich release by Kubernetes - 1.10

Kubernetes 1.10 is here! This is the first major release of 2018 for Kubernetes, which is fast becoming the largest and fastest-growing container orchestration platform. A beta version released on 2nd March provided us a taste of what was coming in the subsequent stable release on 26th March. The emphasis of this release is addressing problems in the key areas- storage, security, and networking plus key features such as the Container Storage Interface (CSI), API aggregation, and added support for hardware devices.

Implementing secure DevOps to innovate with confidence

Security was one of the most talked about terms in 2017, and some of the events such as Equifax, WannaCry, Bad Rabbit, and the Yahoo Bombshell of 2013 exposed the vulnerability of the current IT systems in place. Although most of these events were planned attacks rather than accidents, failure of the security measures taken resulted in the leaking data of millions of individuals and affecting companies with millions of dollars.

Automated RSpec TestOps framework for parallel testing

Operationalize your SaaS the right way

Although the term was introduced at the start of the 20th century, the SaaS market is older than we think. Application as a service, as some of us used to call it, can be dated back to the 1960s, to the times of utility computing. Some of the old-school examples include emails and other messaging services, online office tools, customer management software such as CRMs, ERPs, accounting applications, etc. And now, the popular ones include Zendesk, Office365, Salesforce, Google Apps, Dropbox, Slack, etc.

Custom inventory management using Ansible AWX Tower

In my first blog of the AWX series, I talked about how to set up auto-scaling infrastructure using Ansible AWX for AWS auto-scaling group configuration and deployment. You can also update existing auto scaling groups as well without touching user data.