My first Perl Toolchain Summit has come to a close and it was amazing and productive. I spent a lot of my time containerizing MetaCPAN, talking and helping other groups with Docker solutions for their projects, and laying out future work and directions. All of which would have been difficult if it weren’t for the summit bringing everyone together.

A workflow to create base level images was developed with automatic generation and uploading to docker hub via Travis and Docker Hub. These details were shared with all in attendance who were interested.

The first MetaCPAN hosted site GitHub meets CPAN has been ported into a container and tested locally. While the plan and framework for initial deployment and management via Ansible has been laid down, the site will be going live shortly.

Images were created for the other sites including the main site. These images are available for the developers to use in their local development with plans to roll out to the production services as the Ansible environment and support procedures are fleshed out. The ground work for the Ansible configuration has been laid, with more roles and playbooks set to be developed as needed.

All these new containers and processes have changed the way the development of MetaCPAN happens. No longer requiring the use of Vagrant and with better container management. This will allow for easier on-boarding of new developers, and better control overall. Working together we were able to ensure that the site continued to operate in this new setup. Documentation is still outstanding but is being worked on.

A new container to integrate logging with honeycomb.io was integrated into the stack. This will allow us to forward all logs for all sites and use the honeycomb toolkit to interrogate them, providing better problem determination and resolution.

The future plans are to deploy to severs using Ansible and docker-compose. A further migration to Nomad using nomad-compose will be used for complete container management.

None of this would have been possible without the help of the amazing MetaCPAN team, the organizers and sponsors of the Perl Toolchain Summit.

Booking.com, cPanel, MaxMind, FastMail, ZipRecruiter, Cogendo, Elastic, OpenCage Data, Perl Services, Zoopla, Archer Education, OpusVL, Oetiker+Partner, SureVoIP, YEF.