Fantastic eCommerce SaaS Supplements

As I’ve recently been so much more exposed to the eCommerce world through my current and previous companies, it’s been fascinating to observe the most important factors of an effective feedback loop. With any sort of Commerce business, its essential you do whatever necessary to understand your customers, and luckily, the Internet has helped us understand those interactions (much better than that slip of paper in your hotel room)! The following image is from Slack (yes I know, but I love the way it expands links) and provides three tools I haven’t actually been able to use (yet).

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Container access to the host process namespace

When you’re on CoreOS, short of using toolbox, you can actually solve most of your debugging needs by running containers. However, to really debug the host itself, the app should be in proper host namespace. Here’s a quick example of how to do this with something like htop which needs access to the host process namespace. Docker makes this super easy. docker run -it --rm --pid=host crosbymichael/htop You can also apply this for network based applications:

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File Integrity with Rhash

I’ve recently revamped my entire backup system. A datahoarder archivist like me has tons of data, with different tiers of importance, and multiple varying locations to store it. Though I’ve never lost anything important due to corruption, I absolutely understand the importance in verifying your data is what it says it is. Therefore, I set out to find a minimally invasive utility with a little more intelligence than a basic md5sum but not overbearing.

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Storage Utilities

Anyone who knows me even a little bit understands my archivist tendencies. I love storage, specifically hard disk storage, and the challenge of manipulating data efficiently. A while back, I created a list of the most intriguing data utilities with a variety of features for backup, sync, archival, encryption, and others. Note these aren’t cloud services specifically, but may have the functionality to interact with cloud providers like google drive or s3.

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Bastion Prime: A Containerized Jump Host for the modern era

Today I’m releasing a new project I’ve been working on to help bolster our adoption of more secure connectivity of cloud resources from remote locations. Bastion Prime is a containerized jump host meant to run anywhere (i.e. Kubernetes) as a more secure and ephemeral point of accessibility for bouncing through to internal systems. While a lot of people have successfully utilized things like OpenVPN or Pritunl (which just orchestrates OpenVPN), it can be much easier to deploy a simple container with an already populated authorized_keys file.

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New Container: Engage

Working in Kubernetes most of the time, I find myself doing tons of reconnaissance around the environment I’m in. This can involve understanding the networking structure, environment variables, or other aspects of a deployed container in a distributed architecture. Additionally, testing edge functionality and communication (i.e. http headers) is especially important to ensuring everything works as expected. With this in mind, I finally started down the path of creating my own “playground” container.

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Cloud Native Ambassadorship

In April, I became a CNCF Ambassador! For those who aren’t aware, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is an open source body enabling communities around dedicated projects focused on container and microservice based architectures. With all of the exciting movement around projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy, its nice to have a vendor-neutral foundation backing the continued growth and stability of promising new open source projects. Through things like webinars, conferences, certifications, meetups, and other vessels are being bolstered by the CNCF to further people’s understanding and involvement with CNCF backed projects.

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Planned Spontaneity

Remember how I said I’m back? That also includes a new gig leading DevOps efforts at StockX, a new e-commerce platform changing the way people interact with secondary markets. StockX aims to provide a brand new buying and selling experience for the exact same secondary markets served by the likes of Ebay…with two core differences: Verification of products and a live bid/ask (stock) market for all items. This system is applied to high demand products usually with small supply i.

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Offline Congregation

As I’ve grown, I’ve increasingly realized the importance of making strong, solid connections with people. My extroversion has paid off many times already, and will even more in the future. It has constantly been a joy to interact with and be involved in tech-focused Meetups and Conferences around southern Michigan. Early last year, I founded Orchestructure, an Ann Arbor meetup group focused on DevOps and Infrastructure topics (the Orchestration of Infrastructure).

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Snaps and Devices

For a linux desktop, I’ve emigrated from Linux Mint over to the latest Ubuntu release in my “I’d like everything to work” kick. The older I get, the more I find myself growing in sharp disdain with flakey compatibility or busted scripts making a modern linux desktop more of a chore than I’d like it to be. In this realm, I have to tip my hat to Ubuntu for continuing to be as quick and easy as possible.

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