Using Vault as an External Pillar for Salt
A few tricks for storing configuration secrets in Vault.
There Is No Such Thing as a Static Site
The expectation that all basic webservers will behave similarly with the same static content has some limitations. Between Apache, Nginx, and S3/Cloudfront, there are plenty of opportunities to discover discrepancies around directory indexing, authentication, 404 handling, compression, and caching. Static site generators are a tool, not a silver bullet.
My Daily Checklist
How I use a daily checklist.
Smoke(test)ing for Health
At CTL, we've been using smoketest for several years now. It is a standard part of our stack now and has helped us prevent numerous issues from making it to production as well as simplified and sped up the identification and fixing of production environment issues.
Go at CTL
Go, a systems programming language developed and open sourced by Google, has emerged as a very important language for interesting infrastructure projects such as Docker and Prometheus. It's worth keeping a close eye on the Go community to stay updated on those kinds of projects. This post outlines how, where, and why we use Go at CTL.
CockroachDB Talk Notes
These are notes from a talk by Stephen Kimball about a promising new open source database. While ambitious in its priorities, it seems like CockroachDB developers have chosen a solid set of design goals and have a workable strategy for achieving them.
Salt to Slack
It's extremely helpful to know what's going on with our systems at a glance. One area where we lacked visibility and occasionally ran into conflicts were configuration management runs. We use Salt for our configuration management and orchestration, and here is how we make Salt operations visible to our team in Slack.
ReliefSim on Google App Engine
As an experiment, Anders has ported the ReliefSim application to Google's AppEngine and gotten it running on the free version at reliefsim.appspot.com (the source code for this application has been released on github: github.com/ccnmtl/reliefsim)