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Loving Docker as a Windows guy: August 2019

Over the last few years I've slowly made the transition from "docker detractor" through "docker accepter" all the way to "docker enthusiast" where I am now. Docker isn't the only container tool out there, but it's certainly one of the most popular. It gives a spin on application management and deployment that's honestly pretty refreshing.

At the same time, I've been a windows enthusiast my whole life. I'm not opposed to Ubuntu, RHEL, or OSX, and I'm not a stranger to grep, find, and ls, but I'll defend the use of Windows Server, "where-object" and "get-childitem" any day.

Using Docker as an Admin tool on Windows

Have you ever tried to download openssl on Windows? You need to convert a cert, or just do some crypto work, so you google "openssl windows" and find the source forge entry. After a few minutes of scrolling around confused you finally accept that the page doesn't have a release more recent than several years ago.

So you go back to google and click on the link for openssl.org, and realize that they don't distribute any binaries at all (windows or otherwise).

You scroll a few entries further down, still looking for an executable or guide to get openssl on windows, and you click on a promising article heading. Perusing it tells you that it's actually just a guide for Cygwin (and it would work, but then you have Cygwin sitting on your machine, and you'll probably never use it again). You think to yourself, "There has to be an executable somewhere."

Next you jump to page 2 of the google results (personally it's the first time I've jumped to that page two in years) and scrolling you find more of the same. Linux fanatics using Cygwin, source code you could compile yourself, and obscure religious wars like schannel vs every other cryptography provider.

All you really want is to go from a .pfx to a .pem, and you're running in circles looking for the most popular tool in the world to do it.

Enter Docker.

Using Unit Tests for Communication

Expressing software requirements is hard. Software is abstract and intangible, you can't touch it see it or feel it, so talking about it can become very difficult.

There are plenty of tools and techniques that people use to make communicating about software easier like UML diagrams or software state diagrams. Today I'd like to talk about a software development technique my team has been using for communication: Test Driven Development.

I was featured on the AWS Blog!

Hello everyone,

Shameless self plug here, I was recently featured on the AWS blog:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/how-docutap-automates-cloud-operations-using-aws-management-tools/

The post covers some of the techniques we use for configuration management at my company, many of which I helped design.

Thanks for giving it a read through!

Docker Windows container for Pester Tests

I recently wrote an intro to unit testing your powershell modules with Pester, and I wanted to give a walk through for our method of running these unit tests inside of a Docker for Windows container.

AWS S3 Lifecycle Policies - Prep for Deep Archive

AWS recently released a new S3 storage class called Deep Archive. It's an archival data service with pretty low cost for data you need to hold onto, but don't access very often.

Deep Archive is about half the cost of Glacier at $0.00099 per GB per month, but you sacrifice the option to get your data back in minutes, your only retrieval option is hours.

Unit Testing PowerShell Modules with Pester

Pester is a unit testing framework for Powershell. There are some good tutorials for it on their github page, and a few other places, but I'd like to pull together some of the key motivating use cases I've found and a couple of the gotchas.

Graph Your RI Commitment Over Time (subtitle: HOW LONG AM I PAYING FOR THIS?!?!?)

In my last post I talked about distributing your committed RI spend over time. The goal being to avoid buying too many 1 year RIs (front loading your spend), and missing out on the savings of committing to 3 years, but not buying too many 3 year RIs (back loading your spend) and risking having a bill you have to foot if your organization has major changes.

Our RI Purchase Guidelines

I've talked about it a couple of times, but AWS's recommendation engine is free and borderline magic.

It's a part of AWS Cost Explorer and ingests your AWS usage data, and spits back reserved instance recommendations

Getting Started with AWS Reserved Instances

If you've been using AWS for a while you've probably built up some excess spend. The "pay as you go" nature of AWS is a double edged sword: It's easy to get a PoC up and running, but you can wind up with waste if you aren't disciplined with your cleanup.

Diving Into (and reducing) Your AWS Costs!

AWS uses a "pay as you go" model for most of it's services. You can start using them at any time, you often get a runway of free usage to get up to speed on the service, then they charge you for what you use. No contract negotiations, no figuring out bulk discounts, and you don't have to provision for max capacity.