“Another dimension, new galaxy Intergalactic, planetary”

Happy National Donut  Day!

“There is an inexorable force in the cosmos, a place where time and space converge. A place beyond man’s vision…but not beyond his reach. Man has reached the most mysterious and awesome corner of the universe…a point where the here and now become forever…. A journey that takes you where no man has been before Experience the power⚡️! A journey that begins where everything nothing ends! You can’t escape the most powerful force in the ‘DevOps’ universe.”

Mission #7419I 

So once again, we boarded the USS Palomino 🚀 and continued our exploration to the far depths of the DevOps Universe.  Just to pick up where we last left off,👨‍✈️ Captain Bret Fisher had taken us through the Microservices galaxy 🌌  and straight to Docker🐳 and Containers.  But.. “with so many light years to go.. And things to be found” we continued through the courseware  Docker Mastery: with Kubernetes +Swarm from a Docker Captain  and reconnoitered Docker🐳 Compose, Docker🐳 Swam, Docker🐳 Registries, and the infamous Kubernetes☸️.

Again, we leveraged the portability of HashiCorp’s Vagrant for both Docker🐳 with Docker🐳 Compose, our 3 Node Docker 🐳 Swarm , and the K8s☸️ environments. We were grateful that we had our previous experiences with Vagrant in earlier learnings as it made standing up these environments quite seamless.

We started off with Docker 🐳 Compose which can be quite a useful tool in development for defining and running multi container Docker🐳 applications.  Next, we headed right over to Docker🐳 Swam to get our initiation into Container Orchestration. You might ask why not just go straight Kubernetes☸️ as they are the clear winner🏆 from famous Container Orchestration wars? Well, Orchestration is great for solving complex problems but Orchestrators themselves can be complex solutions to try to learn. From what we witnessed this week we were glad we started there.  We also learned that the “combination of Docker 🐳 Swarm, Stacks, and Secrets are kind of like a trilogy of awesome features” that can really make things easier if we went this route in production.

“Resistance is Futile“

If you not familiar with the story of Kubernetes☸️ or affectionately known as k8s☸️.. It came out of Google by the original developers who worked on the infamous Google “Borg” project.. In fact, here is a little bit of trivia, the code name project for K8s☸️ was called Project Seven of Nine, a reference to the Star Trek🖖 character of the same name who was a “friendlier” Borg. K8s☸️ was certainly uncharted territories for us and bit out of my purview but it was a good learning experience to to get a high level overview of another important component of the infrastruture ecosystem.

Captains’ log  Star date 73894.9 These are missions covered in earnest this week:

• Created a 3-node Swarm cluster in the cloud
• Installed Kubernetes and and learn the leading server cluster tools
• Used Virtual IP’s for built-in load balancing in your cluster
• Optimized Dockerfiles for faster building and tiny deploys
• Built/Published custom application images
• Learned the differences between Kubernetes and Swarm
• Created an image registry
• Used Swarm Secrets to encrypt your environment configs
• Created the config utopia of a single set of YAML files for local dev, CI testing, and prod cluster deploys
• Deployed apps to Kubernetes
• Made Dockerfiles and Compose files
• Built multi-node Swarm clusters and deploying H/A containers
• Made Kubernetes YAML manifests and deploy using infrastructure-as-code methods
• Built a workflow of using Docker in dev, then test/CI, then production with YAML

For more details see the complete Log

This turned out to be quite the intensive undertaking this week but we accomplished our mission and here is certificate to prove it

Below are some topics I am considering for my exploration next week:

• Google Big Query
• More with with Data Pipelines
• Google Cloud Data Fusion (ETL/ELT)
• More with with Data Pipelines
• NoSQL – MongoDB, Cosmos DB
• Working JSON Files
• Working with Parquet files 
• JDBC Drivers
• More on Machine Learning
• ONTAP Cluster Fundamentals
• Data Visualization Tools (i.e. Looker)
• ETL Solutions (Stitch, FiveTran) 
• Process and Transforming data/Explore data through ML (i.e. Databricks)

Stay safe and Be well –

–MCS