First “git push” to GitHub

Back in November 2011, I created a GitHub account because all the cool kids were doing it. After letting that account sit for 8 years, I finally got around to pushing some code to my first public repo.

I decided to spend some time looking at DevOps and understand what all the fuss is about containers and streamlined deployments. A container is a simple way of making sure your code always runs on any type of computing environment, whether its staging, dev, production, Mike’s laptop, Sonali’s desktop, etc… A more detailed explanation of containers is available here from Docker, which is the leader in containerization.

The purpose of the exercise was to learn all the components involved in building a simple “Hello World” Node.js app that uses the Express framework, Docker and AWS Fargate. Fargate is a way to use containers without all the other headaches that are involved with managing clusters and servers.

After spending time with the technology I can see why people just want to go serverless. The movement from on-premise to cloud computing made sense. I feel the next step is serverless and not this pain in the ass middle step called containers. I can see why DevOps folks love it because it gives them something to do, but from a business perspective it’s not worth it. I would spend those engineering dollars on re-architecting the codebase to go serverless.

Anyways, enjoy playing around with my first public repo on GitHub!