In mid-December I had the opportunity to talk at a German conferences called IT-Tage held in Frankfurt. The event was organized by Informatik Aktuell. In my talk I described how traditional infrastructure services can profit from containerization and continuous delivery as well as which challanges arise when automating the deployment as a scalable, highly available service.
When using Windows containers you will quickly notice that Docker on a Windows Server requires an elevated prompt to use the named pipe at \\.\pipe\docker_engine. Today I will demonstrate how to change the permissions of the named pipe to have a similar UX as on Linux.
In my last post, I released several PowerShell modules to talk to several CI/CD tools. This includes InfluxDB a time-series database which is part of the TICK stack by InfluxData for storing and analyzing monitoring data.
I am a console guy, you know. Although a graphical user interface (GUI) is a great way to visualize data, it often falls short of its potential when it does not correlate data. That’s when a command line tool comes into play. It enables you to retrieve different kinds of data and process them yourself. And since, I love PowerShell, what better way than replacing GUIs using cmdlets?!
Today, I had the opportunity to speak at ContainerConf in Mannheim. I talked about the news in the Docker ecosystem with a special focus on the Moby project. This post not only publishes my slides but also the demos from this talk.
Privileged containers have been the reason for many discussions. There are security minded people who would like to eliminate them as well as technical people who need the feature to drive containerization. I’d like to show you how to be a technical person running a privileged container but honour security considerations by dropping capabilities as soon as they are not required.
At DockerCon I had the opportunity to talk about creating a Windows container host from scratch and how to maintain it when updates are published by Microsoft and Docker. Special thanks go out to Stefan Scherer. I realized that the official documentation assumes that a suitable system is already running. Existing work is often based on packer and vagrant which rely on an unattended installation, waiting for the VM to be accessible using WinRM and then injecting commands to finish the setup. I’d like to present how this is done the Microsoft way.
On 10-10-2017 our very own conference x-celerate took place at the trade fair in Freiburg, Germany. With well over 100 attendees, the feedback proved it was a success in its first year.
When writing advanced functions in PowerShell, ShouldProcess enables a script to ask for confirmation and react to different settings of $ConfirmPreference. Unfortunately, the use of ShouldProcess is still somewhat obsure. Therefore, I have created template for this and added unit tests to proove it works correctly.
Once in a while you will decide to execute tasks in parallel to speed up the whole process. And you will quickly start exploring PowerShell jobs. Although they are easy to start off, they always spawn a new empty instance of PowerShell. This post provides an example how to work around this.