The CI/CD and DevOps Blog

This tutorial explains how to manually provision a AWS Virtual Private Cloud(VPC) using Ansible. Before you start, you should be familiar with the following concepts:

• AWS EC2
• Ansible overview
• Ansible vpc module

The best way to get started is to install ansible and run playbooks manually on your local machine to provision a VM. The first section of this tutorial explains how to do that. However, manual execution isn't the best and most efficient way to run ansible playbooks, so we will take a look at the challenges and learn how to automate this workflow with a step-by-step tutorial.

A common complaint from our SaaS customers is that we're so busy building new features, we don't always do a great job letting them know what's new. It's like thousands of trees falling in the forest.... you hear them fall, but you don't know which ones and how many until someone tells you or you spend time scanning the forest and discovering it yourself.

We agree that the latter is a terrible scenario, so we're going to do a better job keeping everyone informed moving forward. Watch for our weekly release notes blog recapping everything that was launched in the previous week!

This week, we launched release 6.4.4. You can find the release notes here: 6.4.4 Release Notes.

Read on to discover some of the more interesting features released today.

This tutorial explains how to manually provision an AWS EC2 virtual machine using Ansible. Before you start, you should be familiar with the following concepts:

• AWS EC2
• Ansible overview
• Ansible aws_ec2 module

 The best way to get started is to install ansible and run playbooks manually on your local machine to provision a VM. The first section of this tutorial explains how to do that. However, manual execution isn't the best and most efficient way to run ansible playbooks, so we will take a look at the challenges and learn how to automate this workflow.

Today, we are excited to announce support for multiple Operating Systems, including Windows, Mac OS, and CentOS. From the start, our goal at Shippable has been to provide you with a common CI and DevOps platform for all your applications, irrespective of application technology and architecture. 

Our journey started with Continuous Integration (CI) in 2013, when we debuted the first CI platform to support native Docker workflows for our customers. Last year, we added Assembly Lines to let you easily define end-to-end workflows across your DevOps tools to achieve Continuous Delivery with Application Release Automation, Release orchestration, approval gates, etc. This completed our end-to-end support for Ubuntu applications. 

As much as we like Ubuntu, most Enterprises have a mix of applications across multiple Operating Systems. We are proud to expand Shippable today with support for multiple platforms, as well as a bunch of other enhancements that will help you manage build infrastructure and create CI, CD, and DevOps workflows more easily.

Let's look at the top features launched today. In upcoming weeks, we will post detailed blogs on how to use each of these features.

Kubernetes is an open-source orchestration engine for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications at scale. When your requires a large number of containers, you need a tool to group containers into logical units, and to track, manage and monitor them all.  Kubernetes helps you do that and is considered the de facto tool for container management.

The Kubernetes project is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has over 1500 contributors. It was started at Google, which still leads development efforts. 

Docker adoption is still growing exponentially and more and more companies have started using it in Production. It is important to use an orchestration platform to scale and manage your containers. Imagine a situation where you have been using Docker for a little while, and have deployed on a few different servers. Your application starts getting massive traffic, and you need to scale up fast, how will you go from 3 servers to 40 servers that you may require? And how will you decide which container should go where? How would you monitor all these containers and make sure they are restarted if they exit? This is where Kubernetes comes in.