Tony Metzidis

Build 100kB Docker Images from Scratch

You may think your 100mB Alpine images are small–but how about 100kB? Smaller images ship more quickly, and contain fewer attack vectors. Moreover, by optimizing images, you discover and isolate exactly what is needed for your app to run.

Let’s Optimize.

There are two key characteristics of scratch-based docker images:

The Dockerfile has two build stages:

a builder–which contains all of the build dependencies including source, libraries and tools and..
a final image, containing the binary and any run-time dependencies (config files, certificates and dynamically linked libraries)

The final image is FROM scratch – the empty docker image

With this approach, your run-time image will contain exactly what is needed for your app to run – no additional config files, daemons or libraries that could be misconfigured or exploited.

May 6, 2019

2 min read

Docker C Scratch

Publish Free Static Websites With Firebase, Hugo and Google Cloud Builder -- Part 2

In Part 1, we completed our development environment, including setting up Hugo and our repo.

Here we’ll publish our site to Firebase Hosting, and create the CI tools on Google Cloud Build to build and publish upon push.

Open Your Cloud Shell

In Part 1, we enhanced our cloud shell with hugo and set up our repo. In Part two, we’ll use it to create the builder and configure hosting.

See the Quickstart for complete instructions

Apr 30, 2019

3 min read

Gcp Firebase Hugo Google-Cloud-Builder Tutorial

Benchmarking Pihole : Pi Zero vs Pi 3b+

Here’s a benchmark comparing pi-hole running on a Pi Zero (with USB ethernet) vs a Pi 3b+.

tl;dr There was negligible performance difference for blocked domains, but a measurable difference in mean for forwarded + cacheable domains. Although the Pi 3b+ has a 11ms better mean response time for forwarded queries, the P95 for pi zero is better in both blocked and forwarded queries.

I would recommend using the Pi Zero.

Apr 23, 2019

2 min read

Raspberrypi Go

PHP Dev Environment One-Liner

Here’s the fastest way to get your PHP app running. No MAMP, WAMP, apache or any of that nonsense.

Moreover, it allows you to run multiple projects independently.

I’m assuming you have docker.

tl;dr

This runs the php docker image, mounts the current directory, and spins up a server on port 8086

$ docker run -v $(pwd):/www -it -p8086:8086  php:5.6-alpine sh -c "cd www; php -S 0.0.0.0:8086"

The Full Version

Create your index.php

$ cat > index.php
<html><body><h1><?php print("Hello World!") ?> </h1></body></html>
CTRL-D

Run the Server

$ docker run -v $(pwd):/www -it -p8086:8086  php:5.6-alpine sh -c "cd www; php -S 0.0.0.0:8086"

Test Your Server

$ curl localhost:8086
<html><body><h1>Hello World! </h1></body></html>

Apr 17, 2019

1 min read

Docker

Being Scientific with Gists : The Sharable Laboratory

Next time you create a post with code snippets–like here on dev.to or stackoverflow–consider sharing a working and buildable gist along with it. By doing so, others can clone, reproduce your results, and commit new variants much more easily.

With the process below, your gist becomes a sharable laboratory. Since the gist contains all of the code variants and test cases, any team member can create a variant and run the tests against all existing variants.

Apr 9, 2019

2 min read

Github

Getting to Yes -- As Quickly as Possible

There was a great discussion a year ago about how fast gnu’s version of “yes” is. If you’re unfamiliar, yes outputs y indefinitely.

yes |head -5
y
y
y
y
y

The key takeaway was that write is expensive and writing page-aligned buffers is much faster. The is true across languages, so let’s see how to do it properly in go.

If you’re shocked or impressed by the results, let’s see you do it in your language – post your results in the comments.

Mar 29, 2019

2 min read

Devops Performance

GCP: Managing IAM Access Control Across Projects -- The Simpler Version

GCP resources are organized into projects – all resource IDs and IAM principles are grouped under a project ID. This means that by default roles assigned to a principle (e.g. a user or service account) are scoped only to project resources. This can be tricky if say your images are in one project’s storage bucket and your app is running in another

If you want to provide a service principle in one project access to resources in another , the approach is not obvious, nor is it well documented.

Feb 25, 2019

2 min read

Gcp Authorization Iam

Publish Free Static Websites With Firebase, Hugo and Google Cloud Builder -- Part 1

Static site frameworks like Hugo allow you to manage content with Markdown and publish content via scalable hosting platforms like Firebase hosting. Uptime, performance and operations cost per user can’t be beat – you can easily hit millions of pageviews for less than $10/ month

In this tutorial we’ll make a production-ready personal website site, that supports multiple collaborators, built using Hugo. Moreover, we’ll publish with the free-to-start Firebase Hosting CDN, and build automatically using Google Cloud Builder.

Feb 15, 2019

3 min read

Gcp Firebase Hugo Google-Cloud-Builder Tutorial

Writing Custom Metrics to Stackdriver in Golang

Instrumentation is a critical part of any application. Along with system counters like cpu, heap, free disk, etc– it’s important to create application-level metrics to make sure health is measured closer to your customer’s experience.

Example metrics could be user-registration, password-change, profile-change, etc. If you see a major spike or dip in these metrics, a wider problem could be indicated.

For this example a custom metric was needed, and no infrastructure was in place for harvesting it (e.g. collectd). Golang is handy for creating an easy-to-install daemon which performs the measurement and periodically harvests the data into stackdriver.

Feb 13, 2019

3 min read

Gcp Stackdriver Monitoring Tutorial

Using AWS IOT To Arm Blink Cameras

Blink security cameras are an affordable home security camera system. Although they lack a formal public API, inventive devs have reverse-engineered their private API to allow for better integration.

Here we’ll use AWS IOT Core, Lambda and node-blink-security to arm and disarm Blink security cameras using an AWS IOT Button.

Activating Your IOT Button

The IOT Button must be configured to your account, which includes joining it to your wifi access point, and installing the client certificates.

Dec 16, 2017

3 min read

Iot Lambda Security Tutorial Aws