Forem: Chris🌱Parnin

slim: Create a micro-vm from a Dockerfile

Chris🌱Parnin — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 12:54:39 +0000

slim will build a micro-vm from a Dockerfile. Slim works by building and extracting a rootfs from a Dockerfile, and then merging that filesystem with a small minimal kernel that runs in RAM.

This results in a real VM that can boot instantly, while using very limited resources. If done properly, slim can allow you to design and build immutable unikernels for running services, or build tiny and embedded development environments.

Build a micro-vm

Create a micro-vm from a Dockerfile. Use build command with a directory containing a Dockerfile.

$ slim build images/alpine3.8-simple

The resulting image is only 23MB! It can be used in virtual box, kvm, or hyper-kit.

Running a micro-vm

Provision a new instance of the given micro-vm image as a virtual machine.

$ slim run micro1 alpine3.8-simple

Demo

This short demo illustrates an image being built, booting with hyper kit in 3 seconds, and then accessing the vm from ssh.

Finding out more

Please see the GitHub repo for more information!

opunit! sanity checks for vms, containers, and servers.

Chris🌱Parnin — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 15:30:12 +0000

When building/maintaining vm images, containers, and servers as part of your infrastructure or CI/CD pipeline how do you verify that you built the right thing?

opunit verify is a simple open-source tool that will run sanity checks against an environment. Things like, is a service running on a port, can my instance resolve dns, did the right version of a package/tool get installed?

Running opunit, will then give a test report, much like a mocha or other testing frameworks.

To setup the checks, you just need to provide a simple configuration file:

- group:
    description: "Basic checks for startup"
    checks:
      - availability:
          port: 8080
          status: 200
      - version:          
         cmd: node --version
         range: ^10.x.x

You can also connect to running containers or remote servers:


# Just give address and ssh key:
$ opunit verify root@example.com:2222 -c {opunit.yml path} -i ~/.ssh/server_rsa

# Or name/sha of container
$ opunit verify -c {opunit.yml path} -t {docker container name or id}

Try it out! Request any new features you think would be cool!

npm install -g opunit

What would you put in a Software Engineering Basics Workshop?

Chris🌱Parnin — Sat, 18 Aug 2018 12:50:47 +0000

For a couple of years, I have been teaching a workshop/bootcamp for new software engineering students in a few courses. This is the material we try to cover on day 1, just to make sure everyone is up to speed.

This is the outline of materials and activities. Click links to see material.

What do you think? Anything to add/tweak/change?

Software Engineering Basics

In this workshop, you will setup a local (or virtual environment) consisting of several tools, programming languages, and libraries, to support software engineering work. You will also practice workflows needed to be productive in software engineering.

The primary goal of this workshop is for you have to have installed and learned a set of relevant tools (and processes in your head) for software development.

Setup. Getting started. Get some tools on your machine.
- [ ] Practice: Installed package manager for os.
- [ ] Installed git, java, python2, nodejs
- [ ] Optional: Make Windows Awesome
Shells. Basic overview of unix shells, shell programming, and windows shell tips.
- [ ] Practice: Run commands to analyze data
- [ ] Setup env variable.
- [ ] Optional: Write a shell script.
Version Control with Git. Basic overview of git. Two interactive tutorials for learning commands.
- [ ] Complete basic Git tutorial
- [ ] Complete 4 levels in Introduction to Git Commits
- [ ] Practice: Creating a repo
- [ ] Optional: Solve all git branching levels
Markdown and IDES. Overview of markdown basics, lists, code, tables. Recommended editors for code. Creating Github Pages.
- [ ] Install IDE(s)/Editors
- [ ] Practice: Update markdown in README.md
- [ ] Optional: Create a GitHub Pages (gh-pages branch)
Virtual Environments. Tools for creating and managing virtual computing environments.
- [ ] Install VirtualBox and Baker
- [ ] Create a simple virtual machine
- [ ] Optional: Create your own environment
Task Management. Using Github issues and Trello boards for task management.
- [ ] Create issue on GitHub with this checklist (filled in)
- [ ] Try trello

Baker, a simple tool for provisioning virtual machines and containers.

Chris🌱Parnin — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 14:36:24 +0000

Meet Baker! --- a simple tool for provisioning virtual machines and containers.

Baker allows you to quickly create development environments for developing and running your code. With one tool, you have the functionality of vagrant, docker, ansible, and task runners like grunt.

This example creates a simple development environment for using mkdocs, a static site generator in python.

name: baker-docs
container: 
  ports: 8000
lang:
  - python2
commands:
  build: mkdocs build
  serve: mkdocs serve -a 0.0.0.0:8000
  gh-deploy: mkdocs gh-deploy

Quickly provision a VM with docker.

name: docker-env
vm:
  ip: 192.168.8.8
tools:
  - docker

To use baker, just place a baker.yml file in your current code repository, then run baker bake. You can run baker ssh to access your environment or run commands inside the environment with baker run. Your code is accessible in the baker environment via a shared folder.

For more details, checkout docs.getbaker.io.