building colima’s user interface 4: creating new profiles

Quick update ! You are now able to create new colima profiles and configure the cpu, disk, memory, and framework

There is a bunch of features that can be added still. For example: information about docker, kubernetes support, more customization. That being said not sure if I am going to continue on with this project. Only time will tell

building colima’s user interface 3: start, stop, delete, list colima profiles

I wanted to share my progress on my colima user interface project. Since the last blog I have added the following:

• List all colima profiles

• Start profile

• Stop Profile

• Delete Profile

Next week I will be working on being able to create new profiles

building colima’s user interface 2: tools

For this project, I will be using Go to build the desktop application. I will be leveraging the Wails framework to create the desktop application and handle all the backend work. Another option was to use Fyne, but I would be limited to their GUI components. With Wails, I can have Go handle all the backend work and use React.js for the frontend. I am choosing not to build this application in Electron because I want to improve my Go proficiency, and Colima is also written in Go.

building colima’s user interface 1: overview

I recently lead the adoption of Colima at Gusto and one major pain points that I heard from engineers was that colima did not have a user interface. The colima-ui project will provide a user inerface for colima. I will be documenting my experience and decisions along the way.

Serverless. . . not actually serverless

I am currently in my journey through the Devops Roadmap and just learned about a Serverless application. It is a cloud provider managed infrastruture for a given application. This means that the app does indeed have a server but the cloud provider manages it. I thought this was mildly funny and thought was worth sharing

Reflection/Look forward - 2023

Career:

• Doubling down on learnings. This year I have been using https://roadmap.sh/devops as a guide for my growth path.

• I plan to develop a side project.

• (optional) be more active on social

Personal:

• Getting married

• Getting back into the gym

• Begin biking hobby

• Eat healthier

• Learn to make latte art

Why am I seeing docker: Error response from daemon: Please run 'docker login'. when I am logged in on Docker Desktop!

I recently faced this issue and I want to share my resolution and other ways to solve.

issue:

docker: Error response from daemon: Please run 'docker login'.

Why am I seeing this error? Well docker is having a hard time trying to identify you credentials. Here are few things to try

• Run docker login

  • This may be redundant but if you have not already ensure you are actually logged in

• run docker logout then docker login

  • sometimes the sessions have be invalidated by some factor.

• remove your docker config

  • Your credentials are stored in docker config. so if you are mac run rm ~/.docker/config.json

• uninstall docker desktop

• uninstall docker-cli

Proxy servers explained

A Proxy server is a web server that redirects web traffic. There are two types of Proxy servers: Forward Proxy Server and Reverse Proxy server. A forward proxy is a proxy server that sits infront of client machines. The forward proxy acts like a middle man for a client machine and a web servers. A reverse proxy sits in front of web server machines and reads/managed requests.

Graph: Local container lifecycle

What is colima?

Overview

Colima is an open source tool that manages Linux Virtual Machines and container runtimes. What that means is that colima leverages another opensource tool Lima to create and manage Linux virtual machines and container runtimes like docker and containerd to run containers inside those VMs. Colima is written in Go and its codebase can be found here: https://github.com/abiosoft/colima

Features:

• Support for intel and M1 Macs

• Simple CLI interface

• Support for docker and containerd (container runtimes)

• Support for Volume Mounts

• Kubernetes (being able to run tools like minikube and kind)

• Support for running multiple instances (Virtual Machines)​

About the author of colima

Abiola Ibrahim is the main author behind creator of colima. You can find him on linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abiosoft/?originalSubdomain=ng. They currently work at Deimos as a fulltime Principal Software Engineer.

What makes Colima faster than Docker Desktop

There are 3 reasons why Colima performs faster than DockerDesktop:

• Lightweight Architecture

• Resource Efficient

• Optimized for macOS

Lightweight Architecture

Colima’s lightweight architecture leverages native virtualization frameworks (HyperKit on macOs and QEMU on Linux) to result in a better result in some cases than Docker Desktop that may have additional layers.

Resource Efficient

Colima is resource efficient, which allows colima to do more with less. Where Docker Desktop has shown to use a higher amount of resources.

Optimized for macOS

Because Colima was built specifically with macOS, it is optimized for macOS by the features created by the open source community

what is apt?

There has many instances when I am pairing with a co-worker and we connect to a machine and run apt commands. Advanced Package Tool(APT) is a packaging tool that allows you install and remove software to Debian and Debian-based Linux distributions (ex. Ubuntu)

what is a linux distro?

A linux distro refers to Linux distribution Software. Linux distribution is an operating system that includes a linux kernel and often includes a package management system. An example of a Linux distro is Ubuntu.

Experiment: Orbstack virtual machine

This short blog post will be used to document my tinkering with orbstack’s virtual machine technology.

Creating Virtual Machine

I start off by creating a VM. I will be using ubuntu for this experiement

orb create ubuntu

orb

Install software

For this experiment I will be setting up a ruby developer environment. I will leverage apt to install software into the virtual machine. I will be following https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-with-rbenv-on-ubuntu-20-04 on how to install ruby on ubuntu with rbenv

• sudo apt update

• sudo apt install git curl libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev autoconf bison build-essential libyaml-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev libffi-dev libgdbm-dev

• curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/HEAD/bin/rbenv-installer | bash

• echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

• echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

• source ~/.bashrc

• rbenv install 3.2.2

Orbstack: A Docker Desktop replacement

I am trying a few alternatives to docker desktop. The main reason for trying out is to learn more about containerization. Orbstack’s key features are:

• free for personal use (paid for enterprise)

• allows you create and interact into virtual machine with their cli tool

• fast

• brew suppport

What is a DDOS Attack and how to mitigate one

What is a DDOS Attack?

A Distributed Denial-of-Service(DDOS) Attack is when a bad character maliciously sends a large number of requests to a website. When a website receives a large amount of requests in a short period it can cause the website to break due to lack of resources needed to support the large amount requests. A DDOS Attack can also be expensive for the owners of the website if the resources used for the website are increased.

What to do when you are a target in a DDOS Attack?

There are multiple strategies that can be used to mitigate a DDOS Attack. These stategies can be conbined to quickly mitigate the attack

• BlackHole Routing

  • Create a Null route that receive all traffic and loses it. This approach is a last straw approach where the owners of the website have no means to block the attack. This is not the ideal approach as it gives the attacker what they want.

• Rate Limiting

  • Setting a limit to the amount of request a website is able to receive. This approach will not solve a DDOS Attack but it will slow down web scrapers from stealing content and mitigate brute force login attempts.

• Web Application Frirewall (WAF)

  • A WAF is a tool that can act like a reverse proxy and be able to filter requests. You can quickly implement custom rules in response to an attack that will be able to mitigate a DDOS Attack.

• Anycast network diffusion

  • By leveraging a Anycast network, you can scatter the attack traffic across the network of distributed servers to which the attack traffic is manageable.

Things to keep in mind

• Ensure the right stakeholders are aware of the attack:

  • Users

  • Company partners

  • Employees

• In order to mitigate a DDOS attack it is important to gather information about the request:

  • Which countries are these requests coming from

  • Are the bad actor requests are spread out sparsely or in a single area

leaving obsidian to notion

I have been using notes to keep track off my work notes, blog posts, interesting finds, etc. Originally I downloaded Obsidian for its node view. I thought it was a very cool feature to see how you notes are connected but after a 1 year of using obsidian, I am moving over to use Notion for my notes.

One of the biggest reason for switching is syncing. Obsidian offers a paid syncing services but I dont see the value of paying 8 dollars a month for that. I have been manually syncing my notes by leveraging git to create a git repository and host in github. This has been very tedious and frankly not worth it. I will be documenting my experience using Notion and follow up with a post deciding if I am going to continue to use Notion.

what does the Docker Engine even do?

The Docker Engine as a clients-server applications. It is made up of three components:

dockerd

- Dockerd is a server with a long running daemon process that is used to manage containers

docker engine APIs

- This api provides a way to interact with the Docker daemon. The docker engine API specifies the interfaces that programs can use to talk to and instruct the Dockker daemon

docker cli

- Command Like Interface(CLI) that leverages the docker engine's APIs to interact with the the daemon(dockerd)

why do I need docker desktop to run docker?

Docker as a technology can only be ran on a Linux Operating System(OS). Docker Desktop creates a Virtual Machine(VM) on you host OS and forwards commands from the docker cli to the linux VM. In addition it provides a Graphical User Interface for visualizing you container contents. There are multiple components that are included in Docker Desktop:

• Docker Engine

• Docker cli client

• Docker Scout

• Docker Buildx

• Docker Extensions

• Docker compose

• Docker Content Trust

• Kubernetes

• Credential Helper

what is virtualization?

Virtualization is a technology that you can use to create virtual representation of servers, storage, networks, and other physical machines. Virtualization mimics the functionality of of physical hardware that allows users to run multiple virtual machine on a single physical machine. Two concepts that are important in virtualization are virtual machines and hypervisor. A Virtual machine is a software defined computer that runs on a physical computer and the hypervisor is a software component that is use to manage the virtual machines.