Well, my AOCMDB project is going to fall by the wayside for a while. Work has has me overwhelmed the past few months with internal changes and a lot of moving targets. I’ve implemented a new orchestration system using MS build and PowerShell for deployment automation which is very extensible, allowing for the addition of more deployment types with minimal effort. Being that it is mostly in PowerShell we can move it to an alternative build system down the road as I see Jenkins on our horizon.
It has been live for a few weeks now, on boarding applications to it has been a little bumpy but I look forward to running reports later this year to see how many more deployments we perform, along with their average deployment time. I’m still extending the number and types of deployments it can do, and am looking into integrating it with Chef, which we are also currently implementing . By this time next year I don’t think our set up will be recognizable from what it used to be, as I’ll hopefully have driven all of our cloud initiatives into production, and our application developers will be focused on newer application architectures.
Presently for work, my primary focus has been our application deployment automation and Oracle Database Automation. However I’m now focusing all of my free time on Chef, and to a lesser extent CoreOS. I’m hoping to set up a CoreOS cluster and start using docker in production as well, with our first production service being Artifactory. I’m looking at setting it up with Fleet, but I think Kubernetes will be the end state.
With these going, I’m feeling like I’m falling out of touch with the current web stack, so I decided to start developing a small web application of managing and sharing e-books. I found that Oreilly has a really nice sharing license on their eBooks (http://shop.oreilly.com/category/ebooks.do) which encourages letting my coworkers sneek peeks at my collection. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything to moderate a private ebook collection that you could host yourself and offer community lending. This project will essentally be a bucket list of technologies I want to get up to speed on, and will hopefully serve as good instructional material in the future when the tech goes live. There’s alot of tech stacks I want to play with, so for my own reference I’m listing them here:
- epub.js (http://futurepress.github.io/epub.js/)
- Angular 2.0 (https://angular.io/)
- ASP MVC 6 (http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/aspnet-vnext)
- TypeScript (Which Angular 2 is written in)
- SignalR
- BootStrap
Essentially I’m thinking of organizing it like a gallery of eBooks, users can add their own the allow other users to “rent” them. Using Angular 2 I can make it an SPA (Or at least portions), and using epub.js I can offer a web viewer. With SignalR I can monitor connections live for maintaining connection to e-books to optimize rental leases on epub files, maintaining a timer on how long an inactive viewing lease can be. (Leaning toward 30 minutes) That said I could allow that to be set at a per book level, with just a generic default to allow users to customize. This would also enable users to take back their books by force.
I’ve been craving learning some machine learning stuff as well, so I’m thinking of trying out Apache Mahout. (http://mahout.apache.org/) Essentially it allows for an easier leveraging a lot of machine learning techniques, including leveraging Hadoop and Map Reduce. Considering the amount of data analysis we perform at work, I think in the future we could easily leverage this tech to more efficiently scale up our data crunching, as least once we have our cloud infrastructure automated.
It’s good to have my head above water again and working on my external interests. I’m excited to start the new project, although splitting my time between that, Chef and CoreOS/Docker will leave me wanting for time. But I’m excited for all of it, so hopefully I’ll make great strides!