Tag descriptor

Deploying and managing web applications

An article, posted 2 months ago filed in deployment, linux, AWS, cloud, hosting, discussion, unix, yaml, virtualisation, docker, local, infrastructure, automation, security & standardization.

Traditional software is downloaded, installed, then run. With web applications it is different. These are built, then pushed to a remote server and then the interface of that application is presented to the screen of the users via web-technologies like HTML, CSS & JavaScript, in the past sometimes assisted by Flash and Java, these days sometimes using WASM. Besides that web applications need databases, storage, cache-systems, maybe a search solution, and sometimes more dedicated tools. From the end-user’s perspective, it became a lot easier (although more restrictive) to access these tools, but getting it up and running got harder.

Continue reading...

Deploy style: Declarative cloud / infrastructure

An article, posted 2 months ago filed in deployment, linux, hosting, discussion, unix, yaml, virtualisation, AWS, cloud & azure.

This is an article in a series on Deployment

Not everything can be run on a single machine (although much can, systems are powerful these days(!)). There are options to declare a full cloud configuration, albeit typically linked to a single cloud provider. You declare what servers need to be running what images, which additional services you need (managed storage, databases), network architecture and more. Well known options are Amazon’s CloudFormation (“limited” to manage AWS) and OpenTofu (multi cloud fork of the now “BSL” licensed Terraform).

Properties

See for possibilities Deploying Web applications:

  • Style: Declarative
  • OS virtuality: Typical
  • Application virtuality: Direct to the virtual OS (often [Containered](https://murb.nl/articles/4…

Continue reading...

Deploying and managing web applications

An article, posted more than one year ago filed in deployment, linux, AWS, cloud, hosting, discussion, unix, yaml, virtualisation, docker, local, infrastructure, automation, security & standardization.

This is the start of a series on deployment

In the old days web software was deployed by uploading software via FTP, in a folder that was then read by a web server, and then presented to the user of the web-application. I’ve also deployed compiled .war files manually via a tomcat web-interface. Databases, storage, these were all pretty much managed by hand, sometimes even requiring physically adding a new drive or server rack.

The problem with this approach, though conceptually simple, is that deploying manually is error prone. One forgets about files, configurations, put files in the wrong directory, or forget to make changes to the database in order to make the latest change work.

The first step is hence automation of the manual steps. I will discuss a few high level dimensions that can be used to discuss solutions. I’d like to stress these are in practice scales and approaches can be mixed.

Style: Imperative vs declarative deployment…

Continue reading...

Terugblik op PublicSpaces Conferentie 2024

An article, posted about 2 years ago filed in microsoft, google, kimvsparrentak, europa, public, cloud, azure, AWS, amazon, eu & ibm.

Veel inspirerende en mooie woorden dit jaar op PublicSpaces Conferentie 2024, maar vrij van zorgen was ik erna niet. Op de tweede dag sprak Bert Hubert uit in een jolig pessimistisch verhaal dat hij er vanuit gaat dat over enkele jaren 98% van de e-mails verzonden wordt vanuit dan wel servers van Microsoft dan wel Google. Ik hoopte na de PublicSpaces conferentie terug te gaan met nieuwe moed en handgrepen een kleine bijdrage te kunnen leveren om deze beweging te kenteren, maar desillusie is het gevoel dat me beklijft. Misschien moeten we hoop hebben dat de uit de DMA act volgende aanscherping van de aanbestedingsregels helpt om te voorkomen dat de grote partijen niet alles op kunnen slikken, zoals Kim van Sparrentak (MEP voor GroenLinks, voor wie ik eerder een positief stemadvies gaf) aangaf. Maar terwijl [Amsterdam trots aankondigt bezit te zijn met een “autonome strategie”](https://a…

Continue reading...