I live in Maine, it’s a great state for a lot of things, but [running a business] (http://www.pressherald.com/2016/11/16/forbes-maine-second-worst-state-for-business/) isn’t one of them. There are a number of reasons, but the major ones are usually high taxes, and a lack of skilled workers. Because of this, there aren’t that many new companies that come along, so I’m always on the lookout for companies that are doing cool things. I like to keep an eye on their progress and try and help them out however I can, so that they can succeed and hopefully inspire other people to start more businesses in Maine.

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I recently talked about my work on Docker for AWS while working on this project I had to do a lot of research around AWS Regions and Availability Zones, and how they work with CloudFormation. Here are the notes that I gathered.

What is the difference between an AWS Region and an Availability Zone?

The easiest way to answer this questions is to start backwards.

1. Servers live in a data center.
2. One or more data centers make up an Availability Zone.
3. Two or more Availability Zones in a given area, make up an AWS Region.

If a region was a Hotel, the data center would be the hotel room, and the hotel floor would be the Availability Zone. All of the hotel floors are in the same Hotel.

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For the past 9 months I have been working on Docker for AWS, which is an easy way to go from nothing, to a Docker Swarm on AWS, in about 10 minutes. The goals of this project were to make it easy for someone with an AWS account to start using Docker Swarm without needing to know anything about Docker and very limited knowledge of AWS.

When I first started, I had no idea what I was going to build, or how I was going to do it. I spent the first 6 weeks, prototyping different ideas, and gave weekly demos to a group of people at Docker. I would take the feedback from those demos and put those towards next weeks prototype. Some of the ideas stuck, some left behind, others were put on list to be added sometime in the future.

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About a year ago, I was frustrated with my lack of new posts on my blog and decided I needed to fix that. After a little bit of soul searching, I decided to reboot the blog, and start fresh with a new platform. Here are a few of the reasons why I decided to change my blog.

1. I didn’t like the look of my blog, and there were no good themes available on my old platform. I’m not a designer, so the best I’m going to get is a theme that is built into the blog platform.

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Normally websites do very few logins, someone logs in once and their session is good for a bunch of hours. Since it’s a one time thing, it doesn’t matter if it isn’t very fast. At Docker our authentication system handles requests for both the Docker Hub, as well as all Docker Engine commands that interact with the Docker Hub (docker push, pull, etc). This Authentication system handles thousands of login attempts every minute, so any slow down in the login process has a large impact on our system.

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If you have some video files stored in Amazon S3 and you want to upload those videos to a Facebook page, using their video API here is some python code that I used recently.

I spent a good chunk of a day trying to get this too work, so I’m posting this here to help anyone else who is trying to do the same.

This code isn’t using any special facebook libraries it is just using normal python along with the requests library. It should be a good enough example to figure out how to do most things.

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Introduction

The goal of this tutorial is to introduce you to Docker, show you what it can do, and how to get it up and running on your system, and how to use it to make your life better.

This guide is open source and available on github.com. If you would like to add to it or fix something, please fork it and submit a pull request.

Table of Contents

What is Docker?

Docker is a tool created by the folks at dotCloud to make using LinuX Containers (LXC) easier to use. Linux Containers are basically light weight Virtual Machines (VM). A linux container runs Unix processes with strong guarantees of isolation across servers. Your software runs repeatably everywhere because its Container includes all of its dependencies.

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I recently wrote a post on how to get Docker up and running on Rackspace and since then I have received some requests on how to get it up and running on other hosts. One of those hosts is Digital Ocean a hot new Cloud hosting provider that offers a 512MB 20GB SSD VPS for only $5.00 / month. A really great deal, and also a great price if you want to play around with some new tool and not have to worry about possibly breaking a production server. This post should guide you though the process of getting an Ubuntu 12.04 and 13.04 VPS up and running with Docker.

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This year I attended PyCon US and I was lucky enough to get a FREE RaspberryPi. At the same conference dotCloud (The company I work for), was giving a lightning talk for a project that we have been working on, called Docker. Docker is a tool that allows you to better manage your Linux Containers (LXC). Shortly after I got the RaspberryPi, I started wondering if it would be possible to run Docker on it.

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Yesterday I wrote a blog post on how to install Docker on to RackSpace Cloud, and one of the steps was to upgrade the kernel to the lastest one so that Docker would be nice and stable. The problem that I found out was that there wasn’t much information how to upgrade the kernel on the Rackspace Cloud servers, so I thought I would put the steps here.

The goal here is to upgrade Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10 so that it has the same kernel as 13.04. Here are the steps.

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