The container space is full of leap frogging technology and it seems impossible to keep up with the pace. Only 2 years ago, Kubernetes was starting to get attention. Compared to the other solutions on the market, it was trailing in a distant 3rd place. It wasn’t stable and had a large learning curve, especially as containers themselves were already part of the learning curve.

However, this week in Seattle marks the final KubeCon as it transitions to Cloud Native Con on in 2017. The conference is oversold and packed tighter than a can of sardines. 7 months ago if you would have asked me how Kubernetes stacked up, I would have said that it doesn’t have a fighting chance. About 4 months ago, customers were asking the {code} team for integrations into Kubernetes so we can stay a part of the larger conversation. With a bit of hacking, Clint Kitson was able to develop a POC with REX-Ray and Kubernetes over a weekend. It all started becoming very real about 2 months ago when we realized that 75% of our customer interactions were all focusing on Kubernetes over competing technologies. 

What changed? Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps the deployment, configuration, and architecture had stabilized. Did the technology leapfrog what others had to offer? Is the idea of Google being the core contributor the biggest selling point? Is everyone in love with Kelsey Hightower? Or maybe it was a combination of all that with community involvement. 

Docker 1.12 brought a few exciting features, notably swarm mode. However, this new swarm mode brought a new docker command for your containers. Gone is the days of using docker run or docker ps for managing your containers. The new command uses docker service. This makes sense as our applications are turning into individual services the need some level of availability that Swarm now manages. But with it comes some subtle changes in regards to using volumes, volume-drivers, and storage (SAN, NAS, DAS).

Using the typical docker run command, we would utilize volume drivers through the --volume-driver flag. 

docker run -d --volume-driver=rexray -v mypgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data postgres

 This is pretty easy to read and you know what it's doing. Specifying the volume-driver and then the host mount mapped to the container mount. You can also specify multiple volumes and only have to use the volume-driver flag once

docker run -d --volume-driver=rexray -v mypgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data -v pgetc:/etc postgres

The new docker service commands brings a few new intricacies so how does this look?

docker service create --replicas 1 --name pg --mount type=volume,source=mypgdata,target=/var/lib/postgresql/data,volume-driver=rexray postgres

Smart move in a world where "VM" or "vSomething" branding is moving away. I'm sure VMTurbo won't be the only company (or person) to rebrand themselves by the end of 2017. The focus has shifted away from VM monitoring which has become harder and harder to differentiate. Most monitoring programs are looking for their niche, and VMTurbo isn't any different. 

An excerpt from the full Press Release says:

the company announced it was rebranding to become Turbonomic, the autonomic cloud platform, to reflect customers’ embrace of real-time autonomic systems that enable their application workloads to self-manage across private and public cloud environments, continuously maintaining a healthy state of performance, efficiency and agility with no manual intervention required.

Do you want to attend VMworld® 2016 US in Las Vegas this year, but your company won’t pay for the conference passes? Try your luck and win two full conference passes to VMworld® on VMTurbo®.

Let VMTurbo send you to VMworld® 2016. Enter for a chance to win two free tickets.

THREE DRAWINGS: MAY 27, JUNE 17, JULY 15

Sweepstakes starts May 4, 2016 and ends on July 15, 2016 at 11:59PM EST. Winners will be announced on the same day of each drawing and we will notify each winners by email.

This might be shameless self-promotion, but I was recently contacted to give a statement as an "Expert" on Javascript. The question was "What are the best methods or resources for learning Javascript?". Oddly enough, I wouldn't consider myself an expert (by no stretch) and I think my AirPair post on How to Create a Complete Express.js + Node.js + MongoDB CRUD and REST Skeleton has gained significant attention.

Check out what others have said in psdtowp.com's post Learn JavaScript: The best methods and resources according to 25 JavaScript experts. 

Here is some advice from myself:

Kendrick Coleman

Website

The best way to learn JavaScript is to start with a front-end programming course. This could be in a class room setting or with online courses such as TeamTreehouse.com. Learning to manipulate the DOM gives you a better understanding of how to use JavaScript to make things happen. After you have your feet wet, it's time to jump head first into Node.js. There are lots of different places to learn Node.js online and each one of them are good in their own regard. Figure out some sort of basic script you want to do first that doesn't require a web stack. This will teach you about callbacks. Once you have standard server-side scripting in your arsenal, you can move to web frameworks such as express.js, meteor.js, and more!

I've made some gradual progressions with my development ability. Started with web apps in Ruby on Rails to better web apps with Node.js + Express and now started to get into the systems programming using Go (golang). It's been a fun ride and I've got a few projects done in Go so far. I'm adding another notch to the belt today with the Docker Machine Driver for RackHD. 

This project wasn't necessarily challenging from a development standpoint. In fact, it was actually quite easy. Here's all the code ->  https://github.com/emccode/docker-machine-rackhd/blob/master/rackhd.go. What made this challenging was trying to interface with 2 projects that are under extremely heavy development. The first is RackHD. With nearly 40 people working on the code base, something is new or changing every few hours. Ideally, you want to keep up with the latest and greatest but at some point you just have to stop at one commit and work from there. The second portion was Go-Swagger. Again, another project under heavy development that is making use of the Go but appealing to the Swagger community to easily generate API bindings. This project is changing every few hours as well. Combine these two together and it's about 2 months of excruciating testing to make something concrete!

The first task was building Go API bindings and that was accomplished with gorackhd. This in itself proved something that would need updating every few weeks because the Swagger Spec is being updated every few days and new APIs were being added. I even got to find that out the hard way when I was trying to make a query lookup happen but it wasn't available (this line of code). Needless to say, I finally got to the point of being able to have a working driver after defining commits that are suitable to work. Shoutout to Schley Kutz for creating a badass Makefile for gorackhd and even fixing issues with go-swagger. 

This week I posted an update on twitter and facebook of my latest project where I took all the wired window and door sensors from my old security system and integrated them into SmartThings. Many people said they want to do the same thing and I know that my usual step-by-step spoon-fed tutorial was in order.

$50 and a few hours later, all the contact sensors from the old pre-wired security system hooked into @smartthings! pic.twitter.com/syGulurrEb

— kendrick coleman (@KendrickColeman) February 20, 2016

After learning how to build websites from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (like bourbonpursuit.com and emccode.github.io) I have ventured out of the realm from normal CMS platforms like Wordpress and Joomla. Most of the sites I build are only a few pages and aren't big content monstrosities. I use Sublime as my local editor and use git for version control. But after I make changes and want to make the files live on the site, I have to use normal FTP methods of moving those files to the shared hosting server. This became really confusing if you made changes to lots of files. Plus, it's boring work.

What I ideally wanted was a way to automatically update the website from the latest changes in the master branch directly from GitHub. Of course, there are ways to update every single file on the site, but why not just use git version control to figure out what files were added or changed. There are tools out there like git-ftp that could do this, but that requires an extra step from me.

I had a few minutes today to finally start implementing and using a continuous integration tool. By default, I decided to use Travis CI because it has native GitHub integration. My immediate gut reaction was to use Travis' FTP file transfer utility. However, there is an issue with the curl command that requires you to specify the filename you want to upload. My use case is for Git to give Travis all the changed/added files and have only those files be uploaded.