DevOps Articles

Jeff Patton presenting at AgileIndy 2024
Agile | 18 min read

Agile Indy 2024 Trip Report

From the AgileIndy site: AgileIndy is a user group devoted to raising awareness, acceptance, and support to people who explore and apply agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable. This year’s conference took place on Friday October 18th at 502 E Carmel Dr, Carmel, IN 46032. A […]

A delivery person handing off a box to a customer. Photo by RoseBox رز باکس on Unsplash.
DevOps | 6 min read

How We Boosted Project Success with Continuous Delivery Before Launch

At one of my first projects at SEP, my team was tasked with building an application sitting on custom hardware that was still under development. We had third-party substitute hardware to use as our team built out the frontend, but there wasn’t a lot to go around. The team recognized the value of getting our […]

Shift Key
Cloud | 13 min read

Check Out Automated Testing for CloudFormation Templates That’s Not Boring

tCloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows you to define your AWS infrastructure as code. And like any piece of software, testing is an important part of the software development lifecycle. This is especially important when practicing continuous delivery or continuous deployment. In this post, I present a working example of a CI/CD pipeline for […]

General Info | 33 min read

DevOpsDays Indianapolis Conference: A Detailed Summary

I am providing a summary of my experience at DevOpsDays Indianapolis. For more context, please visit their website: https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-indianapolis. The conference spanned three days, with one half day of training. On the first day, I had to choose between these options for training: Kubernetes Training by IBM, Cloud Native Continuous Delivery with GoCD by Thoughtworks, […]

Cloud | 8 min read

Success! 🙌 Finishing the Migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS

In Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One, I went into depth about our migration. We containerized our CI/CD using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and the Amazon EC2 Container Service Plugin for Jenkins. This allowed us the flexibility of defining all of the required types of build agents as different […]

Cloud | 7 min read

How to Migrate from Heroku Continuous Integration (CI) to Jenkins on AWS Like a Pro

In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS. I discussed the solution that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post, I would like to dive into what we did […]

DevOps | 4 min read

Integrate and Deploy React with Phoenix

You’ve just finished your lightning fast Phoenix JSON API, what’s next? Motivation My most recent side project, Contact, is a JSON REST API written with Elixir and Phoenix, designed to be the backend to an instant messaging application (e.g., Slack). There was a hackathon coming up at SEP, and I thought it’d be fun to make a frontend for […]

DevOps | 5 min read

Virtual Machine Pains and How Vagrant Can Help You

In my last project we were upgrading the database for the application from Oracle 11g to Oracle 12c. I created and configured a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) using these instructions. Then I started to think about how I was going to maintain the VM over the duration of the Project and for future work. This […]

SEP Tips | 3 min read

A Review of Three Checksum Verifier Tools

What is a CheckSum? A checksum is a unique string that identifies a file. You can think of it as a file’s fingerprint. Why do I need a Checksum Verifier? I have been writing scripts that automatically download programs and install them on computers. It is not secure to just download the file and blindly […]

DevOps | 1 min read

Installing FoodCritic on Windows

FoodCritiic is a linter for Chef Cookbooks. It does an automated code review on your Chef Cookbook and reports violations. See the FoodCritiic home page for a list of violations and how to fix them. Here are steps I used to install it on Windows. Install Ruby Install Ruby DevKit. I put in C:\Ruby-DevKit cd […]

Cloud | 4 min read

Load Balancing with Nginx and Docker

The previous post showed how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy to an ASP.NET Core application running in a separate Docker container. This time, I’ll show how to use a similar configuration to spin up multiple application containers and use Nginx as a load balancer to spread traffic over them. Desired architecture The architecture […]

close up laptop keyboard and screen with code
Cloud | 6 min read

Nginx Reverse Proxy to ASP.NET Core – Separate Containers

The previous blog post showed how to setup a reverse proxy between Nginx and an ASP.NET Core application. In that example, both Nginx and the Kestrel process ran in the same box. As alluded to, there is another (preferable) option. This time, we’ll create two separate containers: one for the application and one for the […]