I spent a couple of hours tinkering with this over the holidays, but mostly put it down and got on with eating, drinking and being merry.

The first breakthrough was that ContextCubed just worked once I had the right Ruby Gems installed (and in fact day 5 had got me to within one line of installation). This means that I can now start up a cluster of ServiceFabric Atlas nodes that automagically join the VPNcubed overlay network with a single command line – nice :)

The final hurdle turned out to be a mix of name resolution and binding. The former issue I fudged with some hosts entries, and the later was a simple one liner in the Atlas config.ini (which is trivial to automate with ContextCubed). Once ContextCubed gets its DNS appendage (DNScubed?) then there should be a decent mechanism for name resolution that ties into the VPN overlay.

When I embarked on this project it was supposed to be simple, and if I look back at all the problems that I encountered and lessons learned then there wasn’t really anything fundamental standing in my way. From a personal perspective the 2-3 man days that I’ve sunk into this have been very useful and educational (and it’s been nice to get my hands dirty with some real techie stuff); and the great thing is that I can now achieve in seconds stuff that was taking me hours when I set out on this journey.

For the sake of completeness here are links to the previous entries (and I know I should have done a better job of chaining them, but I can go back and fix that now). Day: 1, 2-3, 4, 5

If you’ve found this series interesting, then you might also want to take a look at my corp blog post ‘Designed for cloud‘. PaaS in general, and ServiceFabric in particular (with its ability to handle OSGi at scale), are just the sort of thing that software developers need to help them move from design for purpose/manufacture to design for maintenance.