February 4, 2016

294 words 2 mins read

Deploying Web Services with Apache Tomcat and Chef

Open source is an important part of our engineering culture and we love when we’re able to contribute back to the community. We recently open sourced our Tomcat Chef Cookbook, which we use to automate deploying many of our web services here at Cerner. The cookbook is meant to be simple, yet flexible enough to change most anything about Apache Tomcat to your liking. It supports installing any version of Tomcat, configuring any file within the Tomcat installation and deploying web applications.

The cerner_tomcat cookbook is one of our oldest cookbooks which was originally written when we first started using Chef. We created it as the other community Tomcat cookbooks didn’t include all the features we needed. As of today, the Tomcat cookbook provided by Chef seems to be the predominant cookbook in the community; however, it still lacks the functionality and flexibility we need such as deploying the applications themselves.

One of the biggest problems when using Chef to configure Tomcat is that Tomcat uses XML for configuration which does not map very well to Chef’s Ruby Hash-based attributes like JSON, YAML or properties files do. Our first implementation was very similar to the Chef community cookbook in which the cookbook provides a configuration template with a static set of properties. We quickly learned that this solution didn’t scale for us given the varying configuration needs of applications and the ever-changing configuration options across Tomcat versions. Our approach now is to allow applications to provide configuration templates themselves, allowing this cookbook to be leveraged by the various teams deploying Tomcat applications.

Our cerner_tomcat cookbook is one of our most used cookbooks here at Cerner. We would love for you to try out our cookbook and let us know how we can improve it.

engineering
Girls in Technology Movement - Hour of Code

Girls in Technology Movement - Hour of Code

January 20, 2016

As a female Software Engineer, I know the benefits of having other females in the field to fellowship with as well as the benefits of early exposure to coding and the technology field. The Girls in Technology Movement Hour of Code event held December 9th, 2015 at Cerner’s Innovation Campus was a great opportunity for girls from nearby schools to gather and hear a little about the technology industry, the opportunities available for their future, meet some women in the industry, and get a hands-on introduction to coding.

Identifying Network ACL Issues with Chef Locally

November 17, 2015

At Cerner, we use Chef to automate our deployments across a very large distributed system comprised of many thousands of nodes. While we employ ServerSpec and Test Kitchen extensively to test our Chef recipes, this still doesn’t identify all possible failure scenarios. In a large distributed system such as ours, we occasionally run into connectivity failures between machines due to network ACL issues. This could be due to a variety of reasons.
JavaScript Logging: We can do better!

JavaScript Logging: We can do better!

July 20, 2015

Currently in the world of JavaScript these options are what we most commonly use to generate logs: console.log console.info console.warn console.error These are actually pretty good in most modern browsers. Even if you go back to Internet Explorer 8 console.log and friends work as long as you have the developer tools open. Given that we have these logging utilities what is the problem with using them? When in local development these are just fine for helping debug and speed up development.