I have been playing with Docker a lot lately, and it got me wondering how hard it would be to run Docker on the different Cloud providers. I noticed there were already directions on how to install on Amazon EC2 but nothing for the Rackspace Cloud.

If you would like to run Docker on the RackSpace Cloud using Ubuntu you’re in luck. I just spent the afternoon figuring out how to get it installed on Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, and 13.04, and I have included my notes below. 13.04 is the easiest to get up and running since it has the most recent kernel, but the others aren’t too bad either, they just need a few more steps, to get them up to par.

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I recently gave a talk at a DjangoMaine meetup introducing folks to Python and Django. There wasn’t enough time to go over everything, so I tried to pick and choose the parts that I felt where important to go over, in order to have a good overview of what Python and Django is all about.

I hope this was useful to the folks that attended. If so, it would be really helpful to know what parts you would like to know more about. Then we can have some follow up talks doing a deeper dive into those select topics.

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I have recently changed my Django based blog to a statically generated blog based on Pelican, and hosted by GitHub Pages. This is for a couple of reasons.

The first reason was because my blog is really simple, it was just a bunch of reStructuredText documents that were converted to HTML. I didn’t need the Django-admin features and I always felt it was a little overkill for my blog.

The second reason was because I wanted to host my blog contents on GitHub so that others could change/update/edit my blog posts and send me pull requests if they have something good to add. Doing this with my old blog would have been hard, but it will be really easy with this current setup.

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As I mentioned in a recent blog post, in the 11 months since I wrote my first post on dotCloud, I now work there. Besides me working there, there has been a lot of other changes at dotCloud, and I wanted to take the time to update my original post so that it was up to date and had all the recent information. I’m going to completely rewrite the old blog post here, with updated information, and leave the old one around for posterity.

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A lot has happened in the 11 months since I wrote my first blog article on dotCloud. There was an Egyptian revolution, a royal wedding, a new iPhone and iPad, Osama bin Laden was killed, and on a more personal note, I left my job at CashStar and I now work for dotCloud. In the grand scheme of things, my job change was nothing compared to those big events of the past 11 months, but it was pretty big for me.

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Sentry is a realtime event logging and aggregation platform. At it’s core it specializes in monitoring errors and extracting all the information needed to do a proper post-mortum without any of the hassle of the standard user feedback loop.

The main feature of sentry and the ability to send all of your application logs to one place, and then aggregate them, so that you only get one error email for the same error. This will keep your mailbox from flooding, when something goes wrong.

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last updated: 12-07-2012 by Ken Cochrane

Update: 12-07-2012 I have added the youtube video and slides from a recent talk I did on Building PCI Complaint Django Applications.

Update: 04-05-2012 This article has been translated into chinese , by Wujun Shen (吴峻申)

When I first started working at CashStar.com three and a half years ago, I had heard about PCI before, but I didn’t really know what that meant. Since we were building an ecommerce platform that was going to be accepting credit cards over the internet, I knew we needed to make sure we were fully PCI compliant. We were a startup, we didn’t have much money, and any mistake could kill the company. Since I didn’t want to be the one to make the mistake, I spent a lot of time doing research on PCI, and what it took to make sure your web application was secure.

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ActiveState has recently started their own PAAS based on CloudFoundry this blog post is to help you get up and running quickly with a Django CMS installation, and hopefully give you enough information to get your own applications on there as well.

To keep things simple, I’ll just go through the steps that are required in order to get this up and running and add some comments along the way. If I missed anything or if you have any questions, please ask in the comments.

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It seems like everyone has their own PAAS solution these days, and if they don’t have one yet, it is just a matter of time before they will. Red Hat has recently joined in on the fun with their OpenShift platform.

I decided to take it for a test drive, and share my results with you. This service is still in beta and things are changing all of the time, so these notes might not work in the future, take that into consideration when using it as a guide.

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Do you want to use Django-cms on dotcloud but don’t know where to start? All you need to do is follow these 12 easy steps, they will get you on your way.

1. Create a place to store your project

   $ mkdir -p ~/projects

2. Go into the projects directory

   $ cd ~/projects

3. Clone git repo from github, requires git client.

   $ git clone git://github.com/kencochrane/django-cms-dotcloud.git

4. Go into the new project directory

   $ cd django-cms-dotcloud

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