075 Planning for CFML ISP disaster (Commandbox and Docker to the rescue) with Mark Drew

May 14, 2018 By Michaela Light 2 Comments

Mark Drew talks about “Planning for CFML ISP disaster (Commandbox and Docker to the rescue)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

“Challenge, a current client was planning for Disaster Recovery environments but disaster nearly struck due to the requirement of the ISP to move the servers!”

Show notes

Funtimes in deploying real projects
“Your mission, Mark, should you decide to accept it, is… As usual, should you or any member of your I.M. Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Mark.”

Background:

Real client that is moving from big hosted tin to a more elastic solution
Temporal variations in requirements. ASide from busy seasons we have Weekends!
All the environments were different too. So we needed a way to have *SOME* standardization
Vagrant vs Single instances vs Clusters, Railo vs Lucee
- 5 instances per machine
- 5 machines
- Dedicated across clients
- Range of different machines such as windows , linux, PHP, Java and even InDesign running batch scripts.
Started out as a disaster recovery project but as ISP needed to move the client out it has turned into a full cloud implementation
Several Terabytes of image files for example

Build Workflow

Providers
- Gitlab
  - Can script deployment pipelines
- Jenkins
  - Issue can not script your deployment process
- Bitbucket
Stages
- CommandBox Pre-Commit Hooks
  - Testbox
  - Cflint
- Docker image creation successful
- CommandBox Post commit builds
- External testing
- Load testing
  - JMeter
Submitting to your docker repository
- Different docker images?
  - Test vs Normal

2. Docker Server Monitor

- - Fusion Reactor and FusionReactor Cloud by Integral

3. Artefact Caching

- - Build times

4. Logging

- - Getting the right data
  - ELK (The Open Source Elastic Stack)
    - ElasticSearch
    - Logstash
    - Kibana
  - JournalD

5. Configs Live/Dev/Test

6. Central Session Storage

- - CFConfig (CommandBox feature)
    - Servers Environment Variables (Production etc)
    - Generic names eg database for db server
    - Resource domain names
      - Create Aliases for them
      - Handle them with hosts files
  - memcached/redis to store sessions

7. Load Balancing and Orchestration

- - Round Robin load balancing
  - Portainer
  - Kubernetes
  - Docker Compose and Swarm
  - Elastic Container Service AWS

8. Data Changes / Workflow

- - Some solutions:
    - CFMigrations – Eric Peterson
      - Versioning of database
    - QueryBuilder (Fluent Query Builder for CFML) – Eric Peterson
    - Currently using hand crafted SQL files (can be run multiple times)
      - First time alters the columns
      - Second time updates data

9. Dependency Trees of Docker

- - CommandBox handles this

10. Hard Stuff

- - Only one copy of each Scheduled Tasks runs
  - Canary Deployments
  - Green Blue Deployments
  - Service Url for health of the app.

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT for you to make CFML more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at ITB?

His podcast Localhost.fm

Mentioned in this episode

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Bio

Mark Drew

Mark Drew has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability for various well known brands in the UK market such as Jaeger, Hackett, Hobbs, Dyson, B&W, Diesel amongst others.

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01
Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mark Drew, otherwise known as the amazing CFO from London.

Mark Drew 0:09
There's only one of us in London.

Michaela 0:12
Anyone know there's hundreds and hundreds of London? Yes. And he's the director of web development at CMT, which is a web development shop, I believe in the UK

in Greenwich. Yes, he got Greenwich Mean Time, exactly down and he's also the co host of a new podcast called local host. So check that out. So I'll put the link in the show notes to that.

So today we're looking at how CFS can get started fast with Docker and we're going to look at what a Docker container is and why everyone listening should care about that the challenges they overcome Docker versus vagrant, even controversially, our traditional I ISP, he's going to go away if Docker gets its way and how they compare the virtual machines. How you can get started with the Docker engine.

Read more

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