I've been getting back into building scrappy little web apps for my friends. On top of this, I recently joined a startup and getting away from Enterprise class software has made me make a huge mind-shift. In the recent past when I wanted to build apps I was thinking Kubernetes, Helm Charts, etc. However, in small app, and startup land reducing the barriers to ship is very important.

So its no secret I'm a docker fan. In-fact, I've been a fan of docker since the early betas. I work in an office, with a high amount of people running some form of windows, and I hear this quote quite a lot.

Docker for windows only supports windows 10, you can't use docker on windows 7, 8, etc.

Here we are, its 2017 dotnet core is out, and finally dotnet has a proper cli. In a previous post we explored the new cli. In short you can use the dotnet cli to build, test, package, and publish projects. However sometimes just using the cli is not enough. Sometimes, you land in a place where you have many projects to compile, test, and package.

Recently I wanted to make myself a short url host. Really, I made this not to make short urls, but to make memorable urls for myself.

I've been starting to use docker, more and more recently. As this technology has grown many of my coworkers are getting more, and more interested in docker. I put together some materials and a youtube video which may help some of you getting started with docker. If you don't like watching videos, check out the story.md file in the repo. That file has all the content covered. Honestly give me feedback if it helped or not. I might do more tutorials in the future for docker. Docker is such a new technology, and the surface area changes month to month.

tl;dr click here

When we talk about capturing metrics in applications. One server/service that constantly is in all conversations monitoring, is statsd. Incase you have never heard of it, statsd is a udp/tcp server that you send your in-code metrics to. These metrics get aggregated by statsd, and are forwarded to various backends. Some backends are services like librato or sumologic. Other times you are sending metrics to time series databases such as graphite or god forbid influxdb.

This boils down to in code you can say "log whenever this block of code is hit" or say "measure how long this function takes to execute". These stories come together to form pretty graphs, and rich alerts. All of this enabled by statsd.

So now that Windows server 2016 is generally avalible for the first time ever windows users can now use containers. Ok, so what exactly are containers? Well more or less they are virtual operating systems that share the same kernel as the host OS. In regular VM's the hardware is shared between machines, but containers go a step further and share the kernel of the OS. Why does this matter? Well because you are sharing an existing kernel that is already running, your startup times are instantanious. To put this in perspective, this is virtualization at the OS level.

On Linux, containers have been a thing for a long time. This technology is called LXC. Docker itself is a layer ontop of various container platforms embedded in operating systems.