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Building on my previous work, I’ve been working to solve some pain points for deploying and managing VMs. There were a couple big ones that I specifically targetted: Speed. It turns out that building a kernel and an Arch environment from scratch on each VM takes a long time. In-place upgrades. All upgrades were full redeployments. Coupled with the speed problem, this got pretty annoying Secure data. When all the data on the VM is generated on-site and sourced from public GitHub repos, passing secure data (think SSL keys or API keys) becomes problematic. Thankfully, after some thought, I realized that these problems are all facets of what was, in hindsight, a poor design choice: generating the components on the VM itself. In round two, I set out to find a better route. ...

Linux containers have recently been in the spotlight, in no small part due to Docker’s work in providing a user-friendly interface to LXC. Lightweight containers allow us to reimagine how we handle deployments, separation of services, and infrastructure management. A system that can be spun up in seconds, configured on the fly, and spun down just as fast presents the next step in a trend begun by the virtual private server. In a world where all the action happens inside containers, it seemed wasteful for the “host” system to be a full-service Linux system of its own. I went on a mission to strip down an Arch system as far as I could, to the point where I had a read-only system with only essential services from which to run Docker. ...

It’s pretty clear these days that {thing}-as-a-service is a powerful concept. That said, it involves a certain level of trust in whoever is providing the service. Part of that is the trust that they’ll keep providing you the service, but on the tin-foil-hat side, you trust that they won’t use the information you give them to your detriment. This is especially true for storage/hosting service providers, where you’re quite literally handing your data to a 3rd party. I love Dropbox, but I’m not sure I’m ready to trust them with my secret plans for world domination. As such, I’ve decided that I’d like to add a layer of encryption on top of my Dropbox storage, as well as other similar providers. I looked around, and decided to work with Dropbox, Copy (Update: the Copy service has shut down), and Google Drive. As a disclaimer, the Dropbox link includes my referral code so I get extra space if you use it. ...