When you have a blog like this one, or are trying to promote some kind of content like a book on API development with Go, you might be thinking of how to expose your content to a wider audience. Sure, writing about what people actually need is always good, but how can you make sure that you stand out?

When dealing with a new language, if it’s migrating from PHP to Node, or if it’s your first time trying out Go, you eventually get to the point when you have to think about how you will use your new application in production. How you will deploy it, how you will run it, and how you will make sure that it’s running well. I’m a big advocate od Docker, let me show you why.

A few weeks ago I wrote a short article, networking basics with docker. Since then, I’ve migrated my production environment to be docker only, and I’ve deployed 5 docker hosts which handle various tasks, from a production file server, search server with solr, my complete development environment and some websites (including this one!).

Over the course of a week I was hitting a few timeouts in connecting from one docker container to another, and finally, yesterday I consistently pinpointed a 4+ second delay on an API service I was writing. Four seconds. I’ll go over the steps that I took to diagnose and resolve the issue.

This is a story of how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Well, it’s just about as iconic. Lone developer turns to Docker to set up a clean development environment as seamlessly as possible, including the bells and whistles of SSH agent forwarding. I’m pretty sure some of the folks on Docker HQ might have a small panic attack reading this one. Alas, I’m not a cardiac health professional.

If you run several docker containers, you might have already come to the requirement, that they talk to eachother via network. After all, your web application container should use your database container to store to and retrieve data from. This means, that in some way, your webserver container should talk to your database container.

It’s been more than a year in the waiting, after I found out that Mozilla Foundation, Akamai, Cisco, and a bunch of other big players put their support into LetsEncrypt, a free certificate authority. Back then (I’m speaking as if 2014 was still in the time of Yugoslavia or USSR), you would have to go trough several complicated steps for generating a SSL certificate for free (client certificates, issuing certificate signing requests, worrying about key size, key formats, validating your certificate via e-mail, …). I promise, the wait is over.