Last night was the grand final of this seasons Virtual Design Master and what an experience it has been over the past 4 weeks or so. Sadly for me this challenge became too much, the final challenge was a tough one we had to not only look to design something but also deploy onto Packet.net bare metal service. We had some key requirements that needed to be deployed.
The first port of call was to look for a container scheduler that could be deployed via Terraform, I looked a Kubernetes at first but needed to learn a lot in a short period of time. I then came across Packet.net’s own guide to deploy DC/OS using their service and Terraform, this seemed the obvious way to go. This is where I burned a lot of time, my Terraform machine is my Windows machine and this script included some Linux commands to be run locally. I eventually ended up with an Ubuntu machine in AWS to run the script and using Github to change it and pull it down to run. Maybe it was the way installed Terraform but I would run into permissions problems running the local commands. I added some sudo entries which then ran the script but it would never quiet gather the IP info right. I eventually got it deployed ok from the script point of view but the manager would never display the web GUI for mesos. My Linux skills cost me a lot of time here.
I then moved onto Docker running on Ubuntu as I had a little bit of experience running Docker from previous challenges, I setup the required 3 hosts and setup a swarm. It was manual but at least it was a step forward. I then ran Jenkins as a container and then looked to run a copy of the VDM site in a container. I burned more time creating a Docker image for this using Jekyll and maybe got 70% of it complete but at this point I had to call it a day.
Between professional and family life the time for not just this challenge but the others had taken its toll and I dont give up easily I just felt this challenge was a step too far for me.
The other two finalist Chris and Adam completed as I knew they would and with different ideas, both were solid throughout the competition and to lose to those guys is nothing to be ashamed of. Chris ran out eventual winner and deservedly so - Well done Chris!
I would recommend anyone in this field to look at joining next year its a great community event and a great chance to be forced out of you comfort zone and learn some new tech!
Check out the full series here http://www.virtualdesignmaster.io/live.html