Alternatives to Breezy

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

Hi! I am trying to decide between using Calendly or Meetingbird for my consultancy. I would like to connect 3/4 calendars (via Gmail / G Suite) and primarily use Zoom as my connection platform. I'd love to hear about what others use and your recommendations/points to consider. TIA!

I'm looking for a tool or set of tools to enable searching across all of our platforms including Confluence and Jira, Zoho CRM, Gmail, Gdrive for business, Dropbox and iCloud.

Any ideas. Something like X1? IBM Watson Discovery?

(And local Disk of course)

Hello, I am currently looking for a tool for automation tests in order to implement it into our CI/CD pipeline for both web development but also for Android and iOS. I considered Cypress but I need compatibility with Safari. I have knowledge of Java, C#, and JavaScript so the language isn't an issue. Also looked into Nightwatchjs and Puppeteer but found these 3 above more interesting.

My main concern is:

• Browser support - Desktop - needs to support Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge (minimum)
• Browser support - Mobile - Safari and Chrome (minimum)
• App - Android and iOS

If possible i would like to avoid using another tool for mobile (like Appium)

What do you use? What is the one you recommend (even another from the ones mentioned)

Thank you very much for your help!

If you're a developer using Google Docs or Google Sheets... just stop. There are much better alternatives these days that provide a better user and developer experience.

At FeaturePeek, we use slite for our internal documents and knowledge tracking. Slite's look and feel is similar to Slack's, so if you use Slack, you'll feel right at home. Slite is great for keeping tabs on meeting notes, internal documentation, drafting marketing content, writing pitches... any long-form text writing that we do as a company happens in Slite. I'm able to be up-to-date with everyone on my team by viewing our team activity. I feel more organized using Slite as opposed to GDocs or GDrive.

Airtable is also absolutely killer – you'll never want to use Google Sheets again. Have you noticed that with most spreadsheet apps, if you have a tall or wide cell, your screen jumps all over the place when you scroll? With Airtable, you can scroll by screen pixels instead of by spreadsheet cells – this makes a huge difference! It's one of those things that you don't really notice at first, but once you do, you can't go back. This is just one example of the UX improvements that Airtable has to the previous generation of spreadsheet apps – there are plenty more.

Also, their API is a breeze to use. If you're logged in, the docs fill in values from your tables and account, so it feels personalized to you.

Hey everyone, My users love Microsoft Excel, and so do I. I've been making tools for them in the form of workbooks for years, these tools usually have databases included in the spreadsheets or communicate to free APIs around the web, but now I want to distribute these tools in the form of Excel Add-ins for several reasons.

I want these Add-ins to communicate to a personal server to authorize users, read from my databases, and write to them while they're using their Excel environment. I have never built a website, so what would be a good solution for this, considering I'm new to all of these technologies? I know about the existence of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SharePoint, and Google Sheets, but I don't know how to feel about those.

I created a Squarespace website with multiple blog pages. I discovered that the native Squarespace commenting tool is not currently capable of letting people subscribe to my blog pages if they are using Google Chrome or Safari! I then discovered that Disqus email verification doesn't work with Yahoo Mail. I also hate that there's no way to turn off that email verification (which I don't need since I moderate all comments anyway). So I want to use a different commenting system. I've read some good things about Commento. Three questions: (1) will it work on a Squarespace site? (I'll pay a developer to integrate it for me) (2) Does it have its own issues/elements that don't work smoothly, similar to the other two? (3) Is there another plugin I should be considering for my Squarespace site?

Hello, I am currently looking for a tool for automation tests in order to implement it into our CI/CD pipeline for both web development but also for Android and iOS. I considered Cypress but I need compatibility with Safari. I have knowledge of Java, C#, and JavaScript so the language isn't an issue. Also looked into Nightwatchjs and Puppeteer but found these 3 above more interesting.

My main concern is:

• Browser support - Desktop - needs to support Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge (minimum)
• Browser support - Mobile - Safari and Chrome (minimum)
• App - Android and iOS

If possible i would like to avoid using another tool for mobile (like Appium)

What do you use? What is the one you recommend (even another from the ones mentioned)

Thank you very much for your help!