Let's Play!

Posted on July 19, 2019 by

After my last post, it would be a good time to do a bit more of a technical story. The goal will be to set up a Hello World application using the Play framework, a front-end based on Angular running on a Docker image, deployed in your local running Kubernetes!
So let’s play!

Play has been around for quite some time now. It was built by web developers to make it more easy to develop web applications using either Java or Scala. Play is reactive(1) by default, uses the MVC architecture(2) and is built on Akka(3). Akka can be described as ‘the implementation of the Actor Model(4) on the JVM’. Play is a lightweight, stateless framework that provides all components you need for web applications and REST services. It’s easy to scale both horizontally and vertically. The framework integrates a http server, CSRF protection and i18n support, supports Ebeans, JPA, Slick and does hot reloading of your code. This makes it easy to directly see the results of your work. Besides all that, it’s just FUN to use! For more information about Play, just visit their site.

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Containerization: Is it the solution that solves your DevOps issues?

Posted on July 2, 2019 by

Justus Brugman

Nowadays you can’t walk into an IT department without hearing discussions about containerization. Should we move to OpenStack or OpenShift? Do we want to use Pivotal Cloud Foundry? What about Docker Swarm or Kubernetes? How to integrate our new kubernetes cluster into our CI/CD pipelines?

Keep in mind that DevOps using unmanaged infra adds an extra layer of complexity to the development teams. In the end, you might save money on an Ops team, but the tasks still need to be executed, leaving the work for the development team. As an example, when you create some new code, make a pull-request, the CI/CD pipeline kicks in to automatically build your code, perform (unit) tests, deploy to the next environment, etc. When an error occurs, the pull request would be rejected, leaving the developer to fix any possible issues, even infra.

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