Using Drone CI to build and push images to Quay.io

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As my experimentation with Drone continues, the latest task was to get Docker images building and published to Quay.io (more on why we're using Quay here).

Drone uses a .drone.yml file to determine what happens in response to a `git push` (or other events). We tend to use the build section (not shown below) for running our tests, and the publish section for actually building and publishing the image from a Dockerfile. Read on for an excerpt from a single-page JS app I helped deploy today.

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paypal-python 1.2.3 released (+ maintainer needed!)

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To help silence some over-aggressive logging within what is an otherwise handled exception, I have cut paypal-python 1.2.3 and released to PyPi.

paypal-python is for use with the oldschool NVP API.

Maintainer(s) needed!

I have zero interest in maintaining this package anymore. If anyone who uses paypal-python is interested in stepping up and taking the lead, please get in touch via the issue tracker or the Contact me page on my site.

Otherwise, this may be the end of the road for future releases! 1.2.3 is such a nice version number to end it on.

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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