OpenShift Quick Start

David Pitt Articles, AWS, Cloud, DevOps, Docker, Microservices, OpenShift, openshiftseries Leave a Comment

Our previous blog in the series introduced RedHat’s OpenShift solution that provides a way for enterprise teams to implement their own PaaS. Essentially, it sits atop the Docker-based Kubernetes platform to provide a ready-to-use DevOps platform.

This blog introduces two hands-on exercises (taken from our OpenShift Course), that work to walk you through the following tasks:

– Installing OpenShift locally
– Adding a Container with an API service to a Pod

Unfortunately, it will take more than this quick start blog to get OpenShift installed and enabled in an enterprise. That said, developers, system admins, and any party that may be working on or responsible for the platform, will benefit from understanding how to get OpenShift up and running on a local machine as shown in this blog.

JMeter Performance and Load Testing

Todd Horn Articles, Java, Testing, Tutorial 1 Comment

Apache JMeter is an open source application tool designed to load test functional behavior and measure performance on static pages, dynamic resources, and web applications. It can be used to simulate a heavy load on a server or group of servers, database, or network to test its strength, or to analyze overall performance under different load types.

In this post, I’ll provide an introduction to JMeter with the goal to get you up and running (and testing!), more quickly and easily…

Managing Docker Containers with OpenShift and Kubernetes

Casey Justus Articles, AWS, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, DevOps, Docker, Microservices, openshiftseries Leave a Comment

For the last few years, Docker containers have been all the rage in the DevOps world. After all, what’s not to like? They allow you to strip out 99% of stuff in your VM and just deploy your code.

Containers can save resources, speed deployment, scale well and offer more fault tolerance. But how do you manage them?

In my experience, the Docker Machine and Docker Swarm stack hasn’t lived up my to expectations. It has a limited API, no support for monitoring and logging, and much more manual scaling. AWS’s EC2 containers scale well, but you’ll be locked into Amazon.

In my opinion, the best current stack for Docker containers includes Kubernetes and OpenShift. In this blog I will give a brief introduction to Kubernetes + OpenShift with an eye for what they do well…

Explosive Tutorial With Unity3D and VRTK

Robert Rice .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Opinions on the emerging Virtual Reality market vary. One one end, there are those who say it’s just a gimmick and will pass shortly. On the other end, there are those who herald it as the birth pangs of a paradigm shift in how we interact with technology.

I sit somewhere in the middle. I own an HTC Vive and it is pretty dang awesome. The experience is not perfect, of course, but with interest growing and prices coming down, it’s just going to get better.

One expression of VR’s growing popularity is that Unity3D supports VR programming. And, with the free VRTK (Virtual Reality Tool Kit) framework, it’s becoming much easier to get started programming for VR. VRTK implements many basic components, such as various movement implementations, object interaction, and projectiles.

Working on a fun little side project, I noticed one implementation it did not have: a virtual reality bomb. So, I set upon to create one myself. This post details the process I went through for creating a timed, throwable, explosive object for virtual reality using Unity3D & VRTK.

Advanced Node.js Process Management with PM2

Matthew Brown Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js, Tutorial 18 Comments

If you’ve worked on any front end applications recently, you have likely had some contact with a Node/Express application. What you may not be familiar with is how these applications are managed in production.

I recently had a project where I needed to set up a Node application on an AWS server. I needed a tool to solve the technical challenges of managing the Node processes and deploying the application in a very efficient manner.

I chose PM2, which is a handy process management tool for running Node.js applications in production environments. PM2 provides a simple command line interface that makes it easy to get started. This powerful Node module has tools for managing application processes, logging, and more.

In this article, I provide an introduction to PM2, showing why it is such a valuable tool for managing Node.js applications. By way of a reference example application, we show the basic features and commands for using PM2 and give examples of generating configuration files for both running and deploying applications.