Run OpenStack Keystone and Horizon using NGINX on Ubuntu 16.04

I previously wrote an article showing how to convert OpenStack from using an Apache server for both Keystone and the Horizon interface. Since that article was written, OpenStack has moved to the Mitaka release, and Unbuntu has moved to a new long term release "Ubuntu 16.04 - xenial". These two releases bring a number of changes to the configuration. In this article, I show you how to make the transition to ngix running these newer releases.

Where do you conduct your User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities? It's a loaded question that many organizations have challenges addressing as they first need to obtain a clear definition of what what UAT is (and what it isn't) before they even consider where UAT activities should occur. The benefits of a properly instituted UAT environment far outweigh the challenges, and the danger of not having one, but success requires a thoughtful and purposeful approach.

Craig Costello, Patrick Longa and Michael Naehrig, three cryptographers at Microsoft Research, recently published a paper on supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman. This paper garnered a lot of interest in the security community and even made it to the front page of Hacker News. Most of the discussion around it seemed to be how no one understands isogenies, even within cryptography-literate communities. This article aims to give you a high-level understanding of what this cryptosystem is and why it works.

One day I was testing this neat new API feature and was really struggling with those curl examples.

"I'm not a browser!" I thought. "Can I have this in a proper scripting or dev language?"

Since I couldn't find it anywhere, I decided to write this tutorial myself.

Everybody talks about Security, and, in the Cloud, sometimes the tools and options available seem confusing or inefficient because they require a lot of repetitive actions. Plus, it's all using Linux tools. And I want to use PowerShell.

Most companies just need a simple means to filter traffic to their Cloud Servers, and so Rackspace has launched, around 2015 and in limited availability, our own implementation of a very useful feature called 'Security Groups'.

AppDynamics is a powerful Application Performance Management tool that, properly configured, can provide tremendous insight in to application and infrastructure performance bottlenecks and enable operations and development teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues. Although AppDynamics collects and measures application performance data out of the box, some configuration and customization is necessary in order to reach its full capabilities. This guide explains best practices around how to identify your application's critical business transactions in order to get the most out of AppDynamics and, ultimately, the most out of your application and infrastructure.

Using the Azure diagnostic extension lets you capture a good set of metrics to help trend and diagnose your virtual machine. What a lot of people don't know is that you can configure it to capture custom log files.

Azure file storage is a great storage offering for a simple centralized file storage share that I often see go unused. A super feature is the ability to mount the share as a mapped network drive on your local machine.

We have a large distributed system here at Rackspace, which we’re scaling and which currently processes 10 million metrics per minute. Part of the scaling effort required us to switch to using Apache Kafka for our message queues. We'll be looking at a few possible clients to explore our options and benchmarking their throughput.

Automation in Windows has historically been a challenge due to lack of built in tools for remote management. In the past few years, the enhancements to PowerShell and WinRM (Windows Remote Management) have forged a path that is now more on par with other operating systems in regards to remote access.

In a previous blog post, I described how to setup Sitecore in a Docker container. A reader asked about pulling Docker images on an Azure docker host and why it wasn't working. Turns out, there is an open issue about this exact issue. I was doing some testing today in Azure and noticed you still cannot do a Docker pull while your host is running in Azure, so let's look at the workaround in Azure.