Monthly Archives: August 2014

Docker, Distributed Systems, and Why it Matters to Magento (Part 2)
In Part 1 I talked about the reasons behind why I believe a Docker based distributed Magento installation makes sense. In this post I continue with how it could work and some of the problems to overcome. Hosting Provider Images Getting onto a hosted solution, it is easy to get an Ubuntu or similar distribution […]

Docker, Distributed Systems, and Why it Matters to Magento (Part 1)
Docker is a really interesting technology for scaling Magento installations. Docker is standardizing the way to ship application functionality. It goes further than having an installer and setting up a machine with an operating system, the application, and all the configuration settings by providing a way to package all that configuration into a single “container” […]

Magento 2 Demo on Docker and Panamax
I had a question – is Docker useful to demonstrate Magento 2 progress? Magento 2 updates are pushed weekly to GitHub so the code is available, but is it useful making it easier for people to run the code? In practice what may be of more interest showing the installation steps used, knowing that they […]
Installing Panamax on CoreOS (Quick Note)
Panamax can install in Virtual box but can also install directly on CoreOS instances. The main site does not include direct CoreOS installs as part of the standard installation. It is however explained on the wiki. Here are the commands I used (stealing from my previous sequence of commands for cygwin). core@coreos$ mkdir ~/.panamax core@coreos$ cd ~/.panamax core@coreos$ curl […]
Cloud and High Availability Blog Post (Quick Note)
There was a recent Cloud Foundry post talking about different levels of High Availability (HA) support in different PaaS offerings. Of course their solution was great and the competitor’s was not. It came across pretty salesy upon first read. I clicked through to another post on the four levels of HA they support. That came across a […]
Thoughts on Developing Docker Images (Quick Note)
In Optimizing Docker Images there is a discussion on saving disk space when developing images. This is good stuff to be aware of. But I think there is another reason to consider reducing the number of commands in a Dockerfile which is to help with testing during development. I am coming to the personal opinion that […]
Cygwin TERM type and ssh-ing to Linux (quick note)
I have been playing with Docker recently from my Windows based laptop. This means a lot more ssh-ing around the place than normal. Using Cygwin has been a help for consistency (shell scripts work on both), but when I ssh in, the TERM variable is set to “cygwin” which the Linux instances I was using does not understand. I […]

Playing with Docker, CoreOS and Panamax on Windows
Panamax got announced today as a Human Friendly way to manage Docker. If you follow the links in the article you can find installation instructions for Mac OS and Ubuntu pretty easily. But I run Windows on my laptop. Here is how I got it going in case useful to anyone else. I had Vagrant, Docker, and […]

360 or 3D – Which is Best for Displaying Products Online?
Imagery is important for an online store. But if you want to go that extra step, are 360 views or 3D models better? Disclaimer: These views are my own and not that of my employer. Also I picked somewhat random example implementations of these technologies – this article is not meant as an endorsement of any particular […]

Creating a Magento 2 Composer Module
A previous post described a very simple Magento 2 module for showing application state. This post shows how to convert it into a Magento 2 Composer package and add it to a site. Disclaimer: This is not official Magento 2 documentation and represents personal opinions, not that of my employer. (In other words, I’m just mess’n ’round.) Oh, […]