“When you’re working in a DevOps environment, every day is exciting and challenging.” ActiveState’s Phil Whelan takes a deep dive into DevOps with industry expert John Arundel.
The elusiveness of DevOps
DevOps is more than inter-departmental hugging, feedback loops, and automated testing. ActiveState asks John Arundel why it’s so hard to get people to agree on what DevOps means.
Go training with John Arundel of Bitfield Consulting
Get friendly, professional, one-to-one remote mentoring in Go with experienced trainer John Arundel. Absolute beginner? No problem. John will get you up and running. Some Go background, but looking to level up your skills? Don’t worry, we’ve got this!
Are you looking for trouble?
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?
Spliffs and submarines: the two cultures and the state of DevOps
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.
Agile sysadmin: the art of infrastructure automation
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.
Dependency graphs in Puppet
Yes, Virginia, you can get Puppet to draw a graph of your resource dependencies. Here’s how.
Notational Velocity
Notational Velocity (NV) was a “modeless, mouseless Mac OS X note-taking application” noted for being elegant, attractive, and powerful. Now, nvUltra is coming.
Puppet dry run
Puppet's dry-run feature is a powerful tool that's often overlooked by busy sysadmins—it’s a great way to avoid unforeseen side effects of your config changes.
Scaling Puppet with Git
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.
What's wrong with this image? Config management vs the “golden image”
Managing server config with “golden images” seems attractive, but ends up being hard to manage. Automation is more flexible, but also more costly to set up. Let’s examine the trade-offs.
Deciding which Docker tag to use
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.
Securing modern applications in the cloud
The Threat Stack podcast interviews John and Justin about Kubernetes, container security, and much more.
Database migrations in Kubernetes
A quick tutorial on two ways to migrate databases in Ci/CD pipelines: running migrations using a CLI tool, and using a Kubernetes Job resource.
Puppet versus Chef: 10 reasons Puppet wins
Chef vs. Puppet is an ongoing debate, but here are 10 advantages I believe Puppet has over Chef today.
Puppet and MySQL: create databases and users
Most applications use some kind of SQL database. Here’s how to manage your MySQL servers, users, databases, and access permissions using Puppet.
Golden image or foil ball?
Managing server config with “golden images” is more like managing a foil ball: it’s difficult to pull apart, and difficult to press back together. Luke Kanies has a better way.