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Posts by Year
2025
An Evening with Claude Code - or - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI
One evening running three parallel development projects with Claude Code - building a client POC, creating course demos, and fixing blog UI issues simultaneously. AI isn’t replacing developers, it’...
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) on Pluralsight: Complete 4-Course Learning Path
Master Site Reliability Engineering with my new 4-course Pluralsight learning path. Learn Google’s SRE practices, monitoring with Prometheus & Grafana, incident management, and production obser...
2024
Locking Helm Releases to Prevent Upgrades (and Downgrades)
Learn how to lock Helm releases in Kubernetes to prevent unwanted upgrades and downgrades. This step-by-step guide shows you how to manipulate Helm secrets to create release locks, protecting your ...
Tracing External Processes with Akka.NET and OpenTelemetry: Part 2 (Running the Demo)
Part 2 of the distributed tracing series, walks through running the demo code in Docker containers and visualizing traces in Grafana Tempo with step-by-step instructions.
Tracing External Processes with Akka.NET and OpenTelemetry: Part 1 (The Code)
Learn how to implement distributed tracing for external processes using Akka.NET and OpenTelemetry. Complete code walkthrough with practical examples for monitoring workflows in .NET applications.
2021
You can’t always have Kubernetes: running containers in Azure VM Scale Sets
Kubernetes is great for running containers at scale, but it doesn’t fit every project. This post walks through an alternative using Docker and Azure VMSS.
How to Experiment with .NET 5 and 6 using Docker containers - No Local Installation Required
Learn how to experiment with .NET 5 and .NET 6 using Docker containers. Step-by-step guide to running development environments, creating projects, and packaging apps without installing SDKs locally.
Build Docker images quickly with GitHub Actions and a self-hosted runner
Bring your own VM to run GitHub Actions jobs, using your Docker build cache. Stop and start the VM in the workflow, so you only pay when you’re building.
Understanding Microsoft’s Docker Images for .NET Apps
Bring your own VM to run GitHub Actions jobs, using your Docker build cache. Stop and start the VM in the workflow, so you only pay when you’re building.
2020
Learn Docker in a Month: your week 4 guide
The YouTube series of my book Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches is all done! The final five episodes dig into some more advanced topics which are essential ...
LEARN DOCKER IN ONE MONTH! Your week 3 guide.
My YouTube series to help you learn Docker continued this week with five more episodes. The theme for the week is running at scale with a container orchestra...
Learn Docker in ONE MONTH. Your guide to week 2.
I’ve added five more episodes to my YouTube series Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches. You can find the overview at https://diamol.net and the theme for week...
Learn Docker in one month! Your guide to week 1
I’m streaming every chapter of my new book Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches on YouTube, and the first week’s episodes are out now.
What do Istio, SRE and Jenkins have in common? My latest Pluralsight courses
One of my goals for 2020 was to publish much more content, and I’ve started well with a new Pluralsight course every month :) Here’s what’s new.
2019
Learn Docker in a Month of Lunches - My New Book
You can get access to all the first few chapters of my new book right now.
Pluralsight’s FREE Weekend: Your Docker & Kubernetes Course Guide
Pluralsight’s entire course library is FREE for everyone this weekend, from Friday 6th September to Sunday 8th September! That’s over 6,000 courses covering ...
Docker on Windows: Second Edition - Fully Updated for Windows Server 2019
The Second Edition of my book Docker on Windows is out now. Every code sample and exercise has been fully rewritten to work on Windows Server 2019, and Windo...
Getting Started with Kubernetes on Windows
Kubernetes now supports Windows machines as worker nodes. You can spin up a hybrid cluster and have Windows workloads running in Windows pods, talking to Lin...
ARMing a Hybrid Docker Swarm: Part 4 - Reverse Proxying with Traefik
A reverse proxy quickly becomes a must-have when you’re running a container orchestrator with more than a couple of services. Network ports are single-occupa...
Adventures in Docker: Coding on a Remote Browser
This adventure lets you code on your normal dev machine from some other machine, using the browser. It’s powered by Docker plus:
ARMing a Hybrid Docker Swarm: Part 3 - Name Resolution with Dnsmasq
It’s very cool setting up a 10-node Docker Swarm for less than the cost of a modest SoHo server (is SoHo still a thing?). But the more nodes you have, the le...
ARMing a Hybrid Docker Swarm: Part 2 - Deploying the Swarm
Docker Swarm is a super easy container orchestrator. It is more opionated and less configurgable than Kubernetes. There are some things Kube can do which Swa...
ARMing a Hybrid Docker Swarm: Part 1 - Hardware and OS
Docker is a fantastic technology for making your apps uniform. Everything in a container has the same set of artifacts to build it and the same workflow to r...
2018
Your Must-Have PowerShell Aliases for Docker
There’s a bunch of docker commands I run all the time, and I’ve saved countless hours of typing and making typos and fixing typos by putting them in PowerShe...
6 Things You Can Do with Docker in Windows Server 2019 That You Couldn’t Do in Windows Server 2016
There are thousands of Windows Server 2016 machines running Docker containers in production, but there’s always been a small functionality gap between Window...
Getting Started with Docker on Windows Server 2019
Windows Server 2019 is the next long-term support release of Windows Server, and it’s available now! It comes with some very useful improvements to running D...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #26: Managing & Upgrading Apps with Docker Compose
This is #26 in the Windows Dockerfile series, where I look at running, managing and upgrading distributed apps in Docker using Docker Compose.
Monitoring Containerized Application Health with Docker
My latest Pluralsight course is live! This one covers all you need to know about monitoring apps when you’re running in Docker containers on Linux and Window...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #25: Self-Service Analytics for Legacy .NET Apps
This is #25 in the Windows Dockerfile series, where I look at running a .NET Core console app in Docker on Windows, which adds powerful self-service analytic...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #24: Building Distributed .NET Apps
This is #24 in the Windows Dockerfile series, where I look at one pattern for building distributed .NET apps using Docker. This is the build-everything-toget...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #23: Building Mixed .NET and .NET Core Solutions
This is #23 in the Windows Dockerfile series, where I walk through options for building .NET Framework, .NET Standard and .NET Core projects in containers - ...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #22: Extracting Features from Monoliths
This is #22 in the Windows Dockerfile series, where I demonstrate extracting a feature from a monolith and running it in a separate container.
What We Talk About When We Talk About “Modernizing Traditional Apps”
Last month was Docker’s fifth birthday, and the Docker platform has come a long way in that time. One of the biggest - and most exciting - developments for m...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #21: Back to the Nerd Dinner
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #20: Running Your Own Registry
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
This Blog Runs on Docker and Kubernetes - in Two Azure Regions
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) launched in preview in 2017, and after experimenting with it for a while and liking it, I moved my blog to AKS. Right now the ...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #19: Integrating UI Containers
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #18: Splitting Web UIs
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Dockerizing .NET Apps with Microsoft’s Build Images on Docker Hub
You package apps to run in containers by building a Docker image from a Dockerfile. Docker supports multi-stage image builds, so you can write a Dockerfile w...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #17: Connecting to Database Containers
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Speaking Calendar
I get to speak and run workshops at fantastic conferences and user groups, talking mostly about Docker, Windows containers and .NET apps (although I also tal...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #16: SQL Server
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
2017
Modernizing .NET Apps with Docker - on Pluralsight
My latest Pluralsight course is out now! It’s a Docker course for .NET developers and architects who want to modernize existing applications, and run them in...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #15: Healthchecks
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #14: Environment Variables
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Docker Retrospective: October 2017
My monthly retrospectives have fallen behind, but here’s my recap of October. It was a great month for Docker fans - we had DockerCon EU with some major anno...
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #13: IIS Logging
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #12: NerdDinner
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #11: A Stateful ASP.NET Core App
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #10: Docker Volumes
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Docker Retrospective: September 2017
Docker EE 17.06 was released (actually at the end of August), which brings support for Windows nodes to the enterprise Docker platform. You’ve been able to r...
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #9: Container Filesystem, Part 2
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Docker Healthchecks: Why Not To Use curl or iwr
Healthchecks are an important feature in Docker. They let you tell the platform how to test that your application is healthy, and the instructions for doing ...
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #8: The Container Filesystem
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #7
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Docker Retrospective: August 2017
One of the biggest use-cases for Docker right now is the need to modernize traditional apps - the apps which businesses rely on, but take up a huge amount of...
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #6
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #5
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Docker Retrospective: July 2017
Here’s my monthly roundup of all things Docker, with a heavy slant on Windows.
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #4
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Weekly Windows Dockerfile #3
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #2
There are 52 Dockerfiles in the source code for my book, Docker on Windows. Perfect for a year-long blog series.
Windows Weekly Dockerfile #1
I’d love to say it was deliberate, but actually it was just by chance.
Docker on Windows: the Book
358 pages, 52 Dockerfiles and the word “Linux” is only used twice. This is Docker on Windows, a book all about running Windows applications in containers, po...
Docker Retrospective: June 2017
It seems silly to start all these retros saying “it was a busy month” every time, so I’m just going to get started.
Shh… Secrets are Coming to Windows in Docker 17.06
Secrets are a first-class citizen in Docker. They’re for storing sensitive application data, like API keys and connection strings. Secrets have been in Docke...
Docker Retrospective: May 2017
Plenty happening in the Docker and Microsoft space. Last month I got to some great conferences and spent a bunch of time with some awesome folks.
Docker Retrospective: April 2017
There’s lots happening in the Docker world at the moment, so I’m starting a monthly retro of things I’ve done - videos, articles, code samples, slides etc. -...
How to Dockerize Windows Applications: The 5 Steps
You can run any application in Docker as long as it can be installed and executed unattended, and the base operating system supports the app. Windows Server ...
Books
I’ve written a few books - all technical - and there’s usually one or two in the pipeline. (I didn’t write any of the books in the photo).
Speaking Calendar - 2017
NDC Oslo | June 15th
Build a Lightweight Dev Rig for Running Windows Docker Containers
You can only run Docker containers natively on Windows Server 2016. Windows 10 lets you run containers with elevated isolation in Hyper-V mode, but there are...
2016
Relay IIS Log Entries To Read Them in Docker
Docker is a very generous platform. It works hard to make applications think they are running on a normal server, and it doesn’t make any demands on how the ...
Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 2, Connecting ASP.NET to SQL Server
Update! The Nerd Dinner project has moved to my book Docker on Windows. And I have a Pluralsight course on Modernizing .NET Apps with Docker.
Dockerizing Nerd Dinner: Part 1, Running a Legacy ASP.NET App in a Windows Container
Update! The Nerd Dinner project has moved to my book Docker on Windows. And I have a Pluralsight course on Modernizing .NET Apps with Docker.
I’ve installed Docker on Windows! Now what?
Three tips to improve your Docker on Windows life immeasurably.
Windows, Dockerfiles and the Backtick Backslash Backlash
Updated! With the SHELL instruction
1, 2, 3, GO! Run IIS in Docker on Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2016 is available now in an evaluation version. It lasts for 180 days and then you’ll be able to upgrade to GA, which is expected in the new f...
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Mark Heath
This time we have Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Mark Heath. Mark is a software architect using the Microsoft stack, a regular blogger and speaker, a...
Windows Containers and Docker: The 5 Things You Need to Know
Update! You can learn everything you need to know about Windows containers and Docker from my book Docker on Windows and my Pluralsight course Modernizing...
Hadoop for .NET Developers
My latest Pluralsight course is out now:
Hadoop and .NET: A Match Made in Docker
Want to write MapReduce jobs for Big Data in C# and execute them on a Hadoop cluster running Linux? Now that .NET Core 1.0 is RTM, we can do it. And thanks t...
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Craig Shoemaker
On this week’s “Six Questions with…” I’m interviewing Craig Shoemaker: blogger, writer, podcaster, 10-time Microsoft MVP and author of 9 great Pluralsight co...
Querying Elasticsearch with PowerBI
Microsoft’s PowerBI is a great end-user tool for self-service BI. It has a host of connectors so you can easily pull data from SQL Server, GitHub, Google Ana...
Production Docker Swarm on Azure: Why You Should Use PowerShell and Docker Machine
Docker Swarm is a great platform for running containers, spreading the load across multiple hosts. You can set up a Swarm on different host platforms and it ...
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Ben Sullins
This week’s Six Questions is with Pluralsight author Ben Sullins.
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Tim Warner
For this week’s Six Questions interview, I’m happy to be joined by Pluralsight author Tim Warner.
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Shawn Wildermuth
On this week’s Six Questions with… I’m delighted to be interviewing the super-knowledgeable, super-talented and super-nice guy Shawn Wildermuth. Shawn is a 1...
Six Questions with Pluralsight Author: Richard Seroter
I used to be a regular reader of Richard Seroter’s “Four Questions With” series, interviews with technology thought leaders that contained a lot of insight, ...
Post //build - the 4 technologies .NET people should learn in 2016
//build 2016 is over and we had the great set of announcements we’ve come to expect. Now we know where Microsoft’s heading in the near future, what technolog...
Semi-retirement for REST APIs with NGINX and Docker
You can’t really retire a public API, unless you want to break all your clients. But when a project winds down, you may need a cheaper runtime option for you...
Run GitLab on a USB Stick with Docker
I use Git for everything. Some of those things aren’t public (like books and courses I’m writing which are in-progress), and even when they are public I ofte...
HBase Succinctly: free eBook about real-time Big Data
The good people at SyncFusion have just published my first eBook, HBase Succinctly. It’s an 85-page introduction to Apache HBase, the real-time database solu...
Farewell ‘Switch-AzureMode’ & how to fix your scripts
The dust has settled on the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model’s integration to PowerShell, and in the latest Azure PowerShell module (version 1.0.2 - which ...
2015
Spark on Azure: Big Data Made Easy
Apache Spark is an all-in-one Big Data solution which makes it easy to get great results from large datasets; it’s gathering momentum - here’s how Google tre...
3 Reasons .NET People Should Go Cross-Platform
I’ve been interested in Linux and open source technologies for a long time, using them at home and for my own projects, while my professional work was strict...
Why Docker is a great tool for EduTech
I’ve recently finished work on an eBook, and I based all the code samples on a Docker image which I made publicly available on the Docker Hub. Putting togeth...
HDInsight Deep Dive: Storm, HBase and Hive
My latest Pluralsight course is out now:
Powering Front-End Apps with Messaging
I did the last of my webinar series with Particular Software this week. It was about Powering Front-End Apps with Messaging. We had a great turnout and lots ...
Using Nginx as a Load Balancing Proxy for Stargate
Nginx is a great web server, giving you high performance with minimal overhead. It’s also easy to set up as a reverse proxy, to balance load across multiple ...
How HBase on Azure is different
When you spin up an Azure HDInsight cluster running HBase, you get a functional HBase installation that just happens to be running on Windows - it’s actually...
Running .NET Core apps in a Docker container
.NET Core is in the early stages, but a lot of work is happening there. The ability to run the same .NET code on a Linux or a Windows machine is a huge oppor...
Configure an HDInsight HBase cluster that doesn’t keep going BANG! with 502s
Running a massively scalable NoSQL database in the cloud is super easy, but not cheap if you want to run it 24x7. The managed offering from Azure - a dedicat...
Integration testing Storm .NET topologies
In previous posts, I’ve looked at Unit testing Storm .NET applications using the LocalContext and a mock Context to test your .NET bolts, and A stub Event Hu...
A stub Event Hub Spout for testing Storm .NET
If you’re using Apache Storm on HDInsight and consuming events from Event Hubs, the current ‘get started’ approach is to use a hybrid topology with a Java sp...
Securing access to Azure Web Apps
The great thing about Azure Web Apps is how quickly you can move - you can build proof of concept sites or release candidates locally, deploy to Azure and sh...
Unit testing .NET Storm applications
When you’re building Storm apps, the functionality lends itself to the usual suspects of automated testing: unit tests, to ensure your bolts behave correctly...
HDInsight HBase Emulator
The HDInsight Emulator doesn’t provide HBase, which makes it hard to program locally against HBase.
My Pluralsight Courses
I’ve been authoring training courses with Pluralsight since 2013, covering a range of topics - mainly Docker, .NET and Azure, but with some architecture, AWS...
Handling Failures with Messaging
I did a webinar this week, hosted by the good folks at Particular Software - you know, they make NServiceBus and a bunch of other great tools.
This is my new home
I’ve been blogging over at Geeks with Blogs since 2008 but I’m finally jumping ship and moving here.