The Case For Ops-Managed Images

I firmly believe that operations main goal is to increase developer velocity. This means focusing on crafting the tools and systems needed to expedite application deployments to production. A lot of this work revolves around removing operations bottlenecks from that deployment pipeline – the less the developer has to ask ops for, the more they can do on their own.

It would only make sense then, that developers should master their own application dockerfiles (images). This would allow them to create and modify their application runtime environment on the fly, not having to submit tickets for operations to upgrade or install dependencies on the host machines. I used to fully support this methodology, and helped enact it at a previous employer. Hell, the dockercon 2017 keynote even pushed the idea.

But, when I started working on the great docker migration of 2016 (GDM) at a new job, I found myself turning to the dark side of managed images.

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Dockerized AWS Elastic Beanstalk Worker Tier + VPC & RDS

That’s a lot of buzzwords you got there mister

I know, I know – While the amount of buzzwords in the title might be overwhelming, the simple goal of this post is to introduce users to AWS’ Elastic Beanstalk Worker Tier offering, and give a detailed tutorial on how to build and deploy an application to it.

If you don’t feel like reading the entirety of this tutorial (spoiler alert, it’s long), or want to jump straight to deploying & playing with the default app – skip ahead to the TL;DR section at the end! I promise not to judge. 😀

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