Mark Drew talks about “Planning for CFML ISP disaster (Commandbox and Docker to the rescue)” in this episode of ColdFusion Alive podcast with host Michaela Light.

"Challenge, a current client was planning for Disaster Recovery environments but disaster nearly struck due to the requirement of the ISP to move the servers!"

Show notes

Funtimes in deploying real projects

“Your mission, Mark, should you decide to accept it, is… As usual, should you or any member of your I.M. Force be captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your existence. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Mark.”

Background:

Real client that is moving from big hosted tin to a more elastic solution

Temporal variations in requirements. ASide from busy seasons we have Weekends!

All the environments were different too. So we needed a way to have *SOME* standardization

Vagrant vs Single instances vs Clusters, Railo vs Lucee

5 instances  per machine

5 machines

Dedicated across clients

Range of different machines such as windows , linux, PHP, Java and even InDesign running batch scripts.

Started out as a disaster recovery project but as ISP needed to move the client out it has turned into a full cloud implementation

Several Terabytes of image files for example

Build Workflow

Providers

Gitlab

Can script deployment pipelines

Jenkins

Issue can not script your deployment process

Bitbucket

Stages

CommandBox Pre-Commit Hooks

Testbox

Cflint

Docker image creation successful

CommandBox Post commit builds

External testing

Load testing

JMeter

Submitting to your docker repository

Different docker images?

Test vs Normal

2. Docker Server Monitor

Fusion Reactor and FusionReactor Cloud by Integral

3. Artefact Caching

Build times

4. Logging

Getting the right data

ELK (The Open Source Elastic Stack)

ElasticSearch

Logstash

Kibana

JournalD

5. Configs Live/Dev/Test

6. Central Session Storage

CFConfig (CommandBox feature)

Servers Environment Variables (Production etc)

Generic names eg database for db server

Resource domain names

Create Aliases for them

Handle them with hosts files

memcached/redis to store sessions

7. Load Balancing and Orchestration

Round Robin load balancing

Portainer

Kubernetes

Docker Compose and Swarm

Elastic Container Service AWS

8. Data Changes / Workflow

Some solutions:

CFMigrations - Eric Peterson

Versioning of database

QueryBuilder (Fluent Query Builder for CFML)  - Eric Peterson

Currently using hand crafted SQL files (can be run multiple times)

First time alters the columns

Second time updates data

9. Dependency Trees of Docker

CommandBox handles this

10. Hard Stuff

Only one copy of each Scheduled Tasks runs

Canary Deployments

Green Blue Deployments

Service Url for health of the app.

Why are you proud to use CFML?

WWIT for you to make CFML more alive this year?

What are you looking forward to at ITB?

His podcast Localhost.fm

Mentioned in this episode

Mission Impossible Intro 

Gitlab

Jenkins

Bitbucket

Testbox

cflint

CommandBox

Docker

CF Alive Docker episodes

Getting Started Fast with Docker, with Mark Drew

Secrets From the Folks Who Make the Official Lucee CFML Docker Images, with Geoff Bowers

Using Portainer.io (Docker Container Management) with Neil Cresswell

066 The Docker Revolution for Faster ColdFusion Development (and Easier DevOps) with Bret Fisher

071 ContentBox in the Cloud (Docker Magic) with Gavin Pickin

JMeter

ELK (The Open Source Elastic Stack)

ElasticSearch

Logstash

Kibana

JournalD

Kubernetes

CFMigrations by Eric Peterson

QueryBuilder (Fluent Query Builder for CFML)  by Eric Peterson

Portainer

Portainer episode

Rancher

ForgeBox

Listen to the Audio

Bio

Mark Drew

Mark Drew has been programming CFML since 1996, and even though he has had forays into Perl, ASP and PHP he is still loving every line of code he has crafted with CFML. His career has concentrated on eCommerce, Content Management and Application Scalability for various well known brands in the UK market such as Jaeger, Hackett, Hobbs, Dyson, B&W, Diesel amongst others.

Interview transcript

Michaela 0:01

Welcome back to the show. I'm here with Mark Drew, otherwise known as the amazing CFO from London.

Mark Drew 0:09

There's only one of us in London.

Michaela 0:12

Anyone know there's hundreds and hundreds of London? Yes. And he's the director of web development at CMT, which is a web development shop, I believe in the UK

in Greenwich. Yes, he got Greenwich Mean Time, exactly down and he's also the co host of a new podcast called local host. So check that out. So I'll put the link in the show notes to that.

So today we're looking at how CFS can get started fast with Docker and we're going to look at what a Docker container is and why everyone listening should care about that the challenges they overcome Docker versus vagrant, even controversially, our traditional I ISP, he's going to go away if Docker gets its way and how they compare the virtual machines. How you can get started with the Docker engine.

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