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Cloud Native Buildpacks
In the past, I’ve worked with buildpacks through my time using Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry has first class support for buildpacks, which allows you to push code and let the buildpack handle the messy parts of actually running your code. Things like installing a language runtime, installing servers, etc…
Recently the buildpacks world has expanded with the CNCF’s acceptance of the Cloud Native Buildpacks project into the CNCF sandbox (sometimes called v3 buildpacks). In addition to an excellent and easily readable spec, this work brings us the pack CLI tool, which allows you to run Cloud Native Buildpacks on your local PC and easily deploy the output, which is an OCI image, to Docker or anywhere else you can run an OCI image.
Tags: buildpacks, cloud native buildpacks
Freenas: Migrating from VirtualBox to Bhyve
I, like many people, use the VirtualBox template jail on Freenas. I’ve been using this for about a year to run Crashplan. It’s generally worked good, but the last couple of 9.10 maintenance updates have caused some problems (ex: The virtual machine ‘xxxx’ has terminated unexpectedly during startup with exit code 1). See here for more on how 9.10.2 broke the VirtualBox template.
From what I’ve been able to read on the Freenas forums, this isn’t going to get fixed and you have two options. Don’t upgrade and keep using VirtualBox or upgrade and use Bhyve. Since I only have one VM and it’s pretty simple, I opted for the latter solution. This post is going to cover the steps that I had to do to convert from using VirtualBox to using Bhyve and iohyve without reinstalling the VM OS.
Tags: freenas, virtualbox, bhyve
App Updates without Downtime on CloudFoundry
A recent encounter with a customer resulted in a couple good questions regarding the workflow that one would use to deploy apps to Cloud Foundry in order to try for a 100% up-time. Based on that, I would share the questions and answers here.
Question #1 - How do you push updates to your application without downtime?
Currently when you push, or restart for that matter, an application running on Cloud Foundry, the change is applied in a series of steps that go roughly like this.