drone-hipchat released. A HipChat plugin for Drone CI.

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Since the Drone CI Plugin Marketplace didn't have one yet, I put together a quick plugin. It's written in Python instead of Go, so it won't ever be in the official plugin namespace, but it also requires substantially less boilerplate than the Go plugins. So we'll run with it because it's simple!

If this interests you, check out the Github repo and the documentation. You should be able to copy/paste that sample YAML and substitute your values. Since all Drone CI plugins are Docker containers, you'll get the benefit of automatic updates if/when I make improvements or fixes in the future.

I'm all ears for feedback, which you are encouraged to send to the issue tracker.

Example Drone CI Kubernetes manifests

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I've been evaluating Drone for CI at work, with the goal to get it running on Kubernetes. I figured I'd share some very preliminary manifests, for anyone who else may be tinkering. How to use these is outside of the scope of this article, but Google Container Engine is an easy way to get going.

Read on for some minimal Kubernetes manifests for Drone CI.

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Where does Google Cloud fit in the IaaS market?

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Where does Google Cloud fit in the IaaS market?

After spending the last five years working almost exclusively within the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, 2015 has been full of lots of Google Cloud (GC) work for me. This wasn't necessarily a conscious decision, but more a side effect of a new job.

After making the switch my initial impression was lukewarm. In many ways, Google Cloud is following in the footsteps of AWS, but trails by a substantial margin. It was difficult to anticipate what differentiating niche they'd carve out as recently as Q1 of 2015. Sure, Google was able to look at some of the mistakes AWS made and do slightly better. I just didn't see a lot that would make me recommend GC over AWS for general-purpose usage cases.

However, the last few months have brought some interesting developments that have brightened my outlook on Google Cloud's future. Read on to see the madness explained...

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The journey to Quay.io - An introspection and review

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The journey to Quay.io - An introspection and review

We've been putting together version 2.0 of our Continuous Integration/Deploy system at work, which led to me kicking the tires of a bunch of different build/test systems. The goal was to put together a CI/CD pipeline that the entire team would feel comfortable using. Our deploy target was a number of Kubernetes clusters.

With much of our services already being adapted to work with Docker and Docker Compose, we were ready to figure out which combination of systems would build and test our images.

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Enabling Cassandra logback debugging

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In our pursuit for 100% centralized logging, I found myself recently settingup logback-gelf with Cassandra working. The intention was to point Cassandra’s logback config at our graylog2 install, but I had a mis-step somewhere during setup.

After beating my head against a wall for a while, I got in touch with DataStax support to see if they could advise me how to enable logback debugging in Cassandra. They obliged, I quickly found an error message pointing me in the right direction, and we are today happily using logback+GELF with our Cassandra install.

For anyone else wishing to enable logback debug mode, add the following line to your /etc/dse/cassandra/cassandra-env.sh:

JVM_OPTS="$JVM_OPTS -Dlogback.debug=true"

After that, debug output can be found in /var/log/cassandra/output.log.