DevOps is more than inter-departmental hugging, feedback loops, and automated testing. To get a succinct definition, Phil Whelan of ActiveState asks John Arundel, of Bitfield Consulting, what his definition of DevOps is, and why it’s so hard to get people to agree on what DevOps means.
We live in a world of walls, unfortunately, and some people would like to build even more of them. Whatever you think about that, the walls between software developers and IT operations staff don’t do anybody any favours.
A good sysadmin is a good detective. You should make time as part of your job to pick on a machine every so often and examine it forensically, like a crime scene. What’s here that shouldn’t be? Are things working like they’re supposed to? Are there any problems with this machine that have gone unnoticed by the automatic monitoring?
To the progressive optimist, the idea of programmers and sysadmins batting for the same team seems obviously desirable. To the conservative cynic, it seems obviously doomed. Both are half right. The short history of computing has seen the rise of two very different cultures: the people who program the machines, and the people who keep the machines running sweetly.
I recently gave a Devops-flavoured talk at the London Ruby Users Group on agile sysadmin practices, agile web ops, configuration languages and infrastructure automation. See the slides and listen to the audio here.
Yes, Virginia, you can get Puppet to draw a graph of your resource dependencies
Working scientists keep a lab notebook in which they write down everything they did, and what the results were. Sysadmin work is also about careful, scientific, detailed experimentation, especially when troubleshooting.
Notational Velocity (NV) is a “modeless, mouseless Mac OS X note-taking application”, as the author describes it, which is elegant, attractive, and powerful. The original application has inspired various forks, of which nvALT is perhaps the best, and adds some very useful new features. In this article I’ll show you 10 power user tips and tricks to get the most out of nvALT.
Puppet's dry-run feature is a powerful tool that's often overlooked by busy sysadmins. Even if you test your Puppet manifests on a virtualised replica of your production site, which many people don't have the time or the budget to do, pushing changes out live can have unforeseen side effects which are best avoided.
Scaling Puppet is most commonly done using client/server mode. However, is there a better way? We present an alternative to the traditional Puppetmaster solution using Git. Guest post by Stephen Nelson-Smith.
It’s common nowadays for sysadmins to manage very large numbers of servers - often virtual servers created on-demand in cloud platforms like Amazon EC2. How do you build so many servers and keep them updated - automatically, reliably, and quickly?
How does versioning work in container images? What are the different strategies for using Docker version tags? We explain how Docker versions work, and how to use them in your own Dockerfiles.
In a CI/CD pipeline for deploying an application running in Kubernetes, there are a couple of options for how to handle migrations. In this post we’ll discuss two of them: running migrations from your CI/CD tool, and using a Kubernetes Job resource.
Kubernetes security is in the news at the moment, not necessarily in a good way. We thought it might be an appropriate time to share an interesting conversation we had recently with our friends Todd and Hannah at Threat Stack about Kubernetes, container security, and much more! We also had the fun of answering some questions from members of the audience.
Chef vs. Puppet is an ongoing debate, but here are 10 advantages I believe Puppet has over Chef today.
Puppet MySQL management couldn’t be easier. Most applications use some kind of SQL database, and MySQL is a simple, easy to use, drop-in solution. In this article I’ll show you how to manage your MySQL servers, users, databases, and access permissions using Puppet.
