Matt Williams

Author's details

Name: Matt Williams
Date registered: August 9, 2008
URL: http://matt@matthewkwilliams.com

Biography

Matt Williams lives in Columbus, OH, in a house filled with computers, cats, books and fiber. Pursuing the goal of being a modern Renaissance person, he plays with his daughter, cooks, roasts coffee, reads, weaves, studies, and hacks, including crazy ideas like a Cloud in a Box. Docker has been an especial passion since June of 2013.

Latest posts

  1. Weaving with Light Pt. 1 — August 31, 2016
  2. Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards — June 24, 2016
  3. Rules for Operations — April 25, 2016
  4. DevOps Creed (Work in Progress) — April 24, 2016
  5. I am not a Mindreader: a mini-saga — April 11, 2016

Most commented posts

  1. Swarming Raspberry Pi – Part 1 — 13 comments
  2. Docker, Cgroups, Memory Constraints, and Java: A Cautionary Tale, or Here be Reapers (sometimes) — 9 comments
  3. Shrinking Docker Images — 7 comments
  4. Rails & JRuby in a Jar — 7 comments
  5. rspec, restful_authentication, and login_required — 6 comments

Author's posts listings

Apr 28

Heterogenous Docker Swarms Teaser

Categories:

agni, Docker, Experiments, Raspberry Pi

by

new-hope2

Note: This is all very experimental; Docker does not support any architecture other than X86_64. The last few evenings I’ve been working on Mulitifarious, a means of creating heterogenous Docker Swarms. I’d previously found that I can create a swarm with heterogenous members — a swarm which has, say, X86_64 and Raspberry Pi members. The …

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3 comments

Apr 21

‘Piping’ Hot Docker Containers

Categories:

cheminformatics, cloud, cloud computing, cloud-in-a-box, Docker, Raspberry Pi

by

One of the possibly lesser used flags for docker run is -a which allows you to attach the container’s STDIN, STDOUT or STDERR and pipe it back to the shell which invoked the container. This allows you to construct pipelines of commands, just as you can with UNIX processes. For instance, using UNIX commands to …

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2 comments

Apr 19

Docker Containers: Smaller is not always better

Categories:

cloud, cloud computing, Docker, gotchas, Raspberry Pi

by

Generally smaller Docker containers are preferred to larger ones. However, a smaller container is not always as performant as a larger one. By using a (slightly) larger container, performance improved over 30x. TL;DR The grep included in busybox is painfully slow. When doing using grep to process lots of data, add a (real) grep to …

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6 comments

Apr 18

Naive Substructure Substance Matching on the Raspberry Pi

Categories:

cheminformatics, Raspberry Pi

by

Chemists can search databases using parts of structures, parts of their IUPAC names as well as based on constraints on properties. Chemical databases are particularly different from other general purpose databases in their support for sub-structure search. This kind of search is achieved by looking for subgraph isomorphism (sometimes also called a monomorphism) and is …

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3 comments

Apr 15

Raspberry Pi and First World Problems

Categories:

philosophy, rants

by

And now, dear reader, a brief intercalary segue….. Stating the obvious, I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with the Raspberry Pi. In truth, I’ve been trying to discern and/or work around its limitations. Consequently, I’ve caught myself wishing for just a little bit more bandwidth — thus far I/O is the limiting factor …

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Apr 15

Swarming Raspberry Pi: Private Registry for Swarm Images

Categories:

agni, cloud, cloud-in-a-box, Docker, Raspberry Pi, registry, swarm

by

respect-my-authority

Some more backstory on the Pi Swarm I was really excited when Amazon announced their Lambda offering. I thought that it was an awesome idea, but for the lack of an open solution and that it locked you into javascript. I believe that using Docker, we can have a relatively simple Amazon Lambda work-alike which …

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Apr 14

Good Practices for Configuring Docker Private Registries

Categories:

Docker

by

Private registries can be very helpful when using Docker — particularly if you’re wanting to be able to share code locally without either making it public or incurring the cost of a round trip. This post presents some practices which I think make life easier when using a Private Registry. Where to look Docker recognizes …

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Apr 12

Docker Workers Scale Nicely with Multiple Cores

Categories:

cheminformatics, cloud-in-a-box, Docker, swarm

by

chem-swarm2

Disclaimer: The title might be a bit misleading. For this workload, it’s scaling pretty much linearly. Other workloads might scale differently. I was running a quick-ish test on a Pi to see how long it would take to churn through 50GB compressed data. This processing consists of: Determining the files to be processed — this …

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Apr 12

Docker Commandline Arguments are Context Sensitive

Categories:

cheminformatics, Docker, gotchas, Raspberry Pi

by

TL;DR: Position of the commandline arguments matter. `-v` before `run` means something totally different than `-v` *after* `run`. More details below the link.

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Apr 09

Abusing Awk

Categories:

Awk, howto, Sick and Wrong, tips, tools

by

awk-book

Almost ashamed to admit I did this, yet it’s still kinda cool. I use awk for a lot of commandline parsing; I learned it back in 1989…. before perl was much of a thing. For some problems, awk “just works”. So I was wanting to count the number of instances of ‘A’ in a collection …

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