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.

On Monday October 12, 2015, NAKIVO released version 5.8 that can be installed directly onto a Western Digital NAS, thus creating a simple, fast, and affordable VM backup appliance, which can be used both onsite and offsite. Here are some of the details:

• NAKIVO Backup & Replication v5.8 can be installed directly onto Western Digital My Cloud DL series NAS.
• While NAKIVO Backup & Replication is already on par with or faster than competition in terms of backup performance, we are seeing up to 1.6X performance boost when our product is deployed directly on a Western Digital NAS. This is because backup data is written directly to NAS disks, bypassing file protocols such as NFS and CIFS.
• NAKIVO Backup & Replication v5.8 can be deployed even on entry-level NAS devices, as the product requires just 2 CPU cores and 1 GB of RAM to be fully operational, and still deliver high backup speeds. For example, the Western Digital DL 2100 NAS with 12 TBs of storage has a list price of less than $850 which is enough for the data backup needs of a typical VMware Essentials environment.
• When installed on a NAS, NAKIVO Backup & Replication delivers a number of benefits:
  
  • All-in-one VM data protection – a VM backup appliance combines backup software, data deduplication, and backup hardware in a single solution that is affordable (5X vs. competition), fast (over 1 Gbps backup), reliable (Western Digital + NAKIVO), and easy to manage.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED BY DOCKER OR EMC. THIS IS NOT EVEN A CONSIDERED A VERSION OF DOCKER MACHINE. THIS IS A PROJECT FLING TO PROVE THE ABILITY.

TL;DR get the Docker Machine with Extensions binary and try it yourself. Or watch the youtube video at the very bottom to see it in action.

I've had some fun playing with Go the past few weeks and I was able to create a very powerful customization. I present to you Docker Machine with Extensions! Using a standard template, it's possible to have a completely customized Docker Machine installation.

But, why is this important? 

Docker Machine gets you a “docker ready” host. It automatically configures the host OS to run Docker containers and can be joined to a Swarm cluster. But what about everything else that goes into daily operations? Configuration management, Docker Engine pluggable extensions, crazy security configurations, etc! Those are the things that can push Docker Machine that extra mile.

The EMC {code} team came up with a clever way to have generic and native “extensions” using a standard JSON file. In short, here is what a JSON file allows you to do:

• Environment Variables: Set environment variables to /etc/environment that could be used for customization of anything
• Copy: Specify a source and destination and it will invoke the docker-machine scp command to move files from your local host to a remote host or between remote hosts. This can be used to move binaries, transfer configuration files, etc.
• Run: Create an ordered list of commands to run. Install packages, move files, or do anything.
• ValidOS: Specify a range of operating systems that will work with this configuration.

I really didn't want to write a "hate" piece, but I've been backed into a corner... AT&T Uverse Internet DOES NOT WORK with Docker Hub. Also, AT&T wants ME TO PAY to have it fixed. Here's my story.

**UPDATE 9/25/2015**

Uverse is now working with Docker Hub. Thanks for everyone that was involved!

I had Uverse installed on 9/21/2015. I had been hacking on a new Docker Machine piece on my Verizon MiFi for a few days while I was at the office. Since my kitchen is being remodeled, I wanted to be there so I could monitor the progress. So, I'll just work from home. Today is 9/24/2015.

I finished a commit and needed to run a build. So I used my Docker Machine host to do that. I began the process and it got stuck:

kcoleman-mbp:machine kcoleman$ make
script/validate-dco
Congratulations!  All commits are properly signed with the DCO!
script/validate-gofmt
Congratulations!  All Go source files are properly formatted.
script/test
./...
Sending build context to Docker daemon 131.8 MB
Step 0 : FROM golang:1.4.2-cross
Pulling repository docker.io/library/golang
Network timed out while trying to connect to https://index.docker.io/v1/repositories/library/golang/images. You may want to check your internet connection or if you are behind a proxy.
make: *** [test] Error 1

What? That's weird. Well what about just trying to run a container?

kcoleman-mbp:v050-dev kcoleman$ docker run -ti busybox
Unable to find image 'busybox:latest' locally
Pulling repository docker.io/library/busybox
Network timed out while trying to connect to https://index.docker.io/v1/repositories/library/busybox/images. You may want to check your internet connection or if you are behind a proxy.

Maybe it's an issue with my home network since I have another router. I hopped on the Uverse Wifi directly, same thing. Disabled the entire firewall, same thing. Gave my mac IP Passthrough, same thing.

This morning, (8/26/15) Edward Haletky of the Virtualzation Practice published the article CONTAINERS ARE THE FUTURE, IF … which needs more clarification. I was going to respond over twitter, but there was no way that was happening. So lets take some of these line by line. NOTE: this is my opinion from someone who has been in the container space for almost 2 years now.

Docker has a lot of work to go if it will take over the world. Here are some of the hurdles! https://t.co/FYwT3hOW5c /cc @KendrickColeman

— Texiwill (@Texiwill) August 26, 2015

 "The reasons are myriad, but there seem to be some issues with people saying that virtualization is dead (I do not agree)"

I agree too. Virtualization is the new legacy. Virtualization will be around for 10 years and longer. But it's not the new hotness.

"or that containers on bare metal with CoreOS, Red Hat Atomic, or some other container-built OS is the future (which is possible). Neither of these will happen unless we consider why clouds are so popular. Would a cloud give up the automation and tools it has just to go back to bare metal with containers?"

Yes they will give it up. Times and processes change. That's like saying we are supposed to treat VMs just like they were physical machines. The hypervisor is a CPU, Memory, and Management resource that must be accounted for with any operation. We can get rid of that hypervisor in time.

"I have yet to hear of a Docker environment being used outside of virtual machines in a multi-tenant cloud. Why? Because Docker and Docker-like containers, have no concept of tenancy."

True, 99% of cloud environments that run containers are ran on top of virtual machines for this reason. But I think you are confusing a few things. You talked about containers within "organizations". This is a service provider issue. That "service provider" could be internal IT but most shops couldn't get IaaS with VMs, why would they think multi-tenant containers are the way to do things? This technology is only 2 years old. How long did it take VMware to have a multi-tenant solution? vCloud was killed off and vCAC isn't a very good answer either. Today, multi-tenant approaches are 100% customized and will be like that for a while. Making this point pretty moot IMO.

When I first started designing the Bourbon Pursuit Podcast webpage from scratch I wanted to make sure the entire site was responsive from big 30" monitors to the smallest mobile and tablet screens. Many people are familiar with Libsyn as the popular hosting platform for many podcasts. However, their process for embedding their player can be improved beyond setting the Width and Height.

First off, never use the Legacy player. It's based off flash and will not work on any mobile device. I will be using the Standard player since it's based on HTML5 and can be manipulated. Let's take a look at the Embed code that Libsyn provides. It's fixed with height and weight. We will put it some custom CSS and change this embed code so the only thing you will ever change is the ID for every new episode (ie. ...embed/episode/id/3703250/height/50...