My idea of utopia is the choice to do what you want, when you want. By leveraging automation, I believe everything can be provided for in abundance. Food farmed or created. Housing everywhere. Work? Not really heard of. After all, if everyone has food and accommodation provided, most of your income is no longer needed.
Let’s have fun, pursue true happiness and fulfilment. Play games, read books, study history or philosophy. Maybe the robots can take over the world, and we can live in a zoo, where the robots feed us and allow us to do whatever we want and…
stonehenge; unchanging
Immutable
Unchanging over time or unable to be changed.
This is one of the rules I use for cloud servers. This gives two advantages:-
- If you build servers using an automated, repeatable method, it is easy to build new ones.
- You know exactly what is on the server. No hacks or patches applied manually. If they are not included in the automated process, they will be lost.
Fabulous, but there must be some drawbacks yes? Of course, you can guarantee that something will need to be patched or updated on the server. …
Datacenters of the 50s
Datacenters have been with us for a very long time. Since the 50s with the large mainframes. Now the datacenters have moved and we can rent servers. In this article I will share my approach to building servers for the cloud instead of for the datacenter.
Cloud?
AWS started out as an internal product where Amazon.com developers could request servers to test code on and order it as easily as their customers bought books. Amazon.com was, and still is, growing at some pace. The Amazon.com website needs servers to grow into and to test with. Selling the…
DevOps Culture and Business
I am often asked what do I do?
Until recently I didn’t have a clear way of describing my product / service of my role as a DevOps dude.
After a pitch I presented at #Pitchfest as part of the Key Person of Influence programme, I received some feedback that annoyed me a bit. This just means that I didn’t describe what I do well enough.
As a techie, I know that communication is a key skill. While I’m improving, it doesn’t come as a surprise, that people often leave interactions with me, with a feeling of confusion. I try to use common situations…
On a daily basis, my code runs to build multiple environments for the database warehouse project. The dev side of DevOps is about the role of creating and testing the automation processes.
As the cloud, AWS in this case, gives us flexibility to run servers on demand and charge by the hour, my client saves money by only having the servers operational during the hours that the development teams are in the office.
Sunrise start for the automation
So the servers are ready to do their stuff, the automation to create them starts early in the morning, around 5–6am. I…
It has shipped! Puppet 5 is here and the gem has been available since the 27th June 2017.
Puppet 5 shipped
What does this mean to us DevOps techies though?
The main ‘features’ of puppet 5 are largely around standardising on other product version numbers of the major puppet components. Server, puppetDB and Agent.
As you probably know, I’m a big fan of the Agent, deployed in a masterless fashion. Focusing on the agent then;
Puppet 5.0.0
Facter 3.7.0
Hiera 5.0.0
Puppet 5 has hiera 5 built in which, amongst other things, expects a new configuration file. …
AWS costs can burn your money
Controlling your costs in an important aspect of any business and project; with cloud projects this is even more important due to the number of decisions that can have a drastic effect on your monthly AWS bill.
The four main areas that will affect your costs are: — unused or forgotten resources, AWS application design, correct sizing of resources, and discount options such as reserved instances.
Unused resources
Your ongoing battle is going to be with resources that have been created and used for a short while, then left running or allocated to your account.
With…
When a server doesn’t build
Software versions are released constantly, but not all versions play nice. Bundles of compatible software versions will create stability.
This is especially true when working with R or Python modules. I use puppet and the default state to install package is installed. When using providers using yum or apt, installed means latest if the package is not installed already.
With Python, the pip and pip3 provider is available. These all have the habit of installing the latest version of whatever package is specified. …
This week I attended and spoke again, at PuppetCamp London 2017. We enjoyed some interesting talks off the back of the State of Devops report, and the DevOps Enterprise Summit.
Whilst enjoying the views of london, I listened to several people from Puppet in the morning.
This week’s focus is on code quality. This is where the code that we create is clear and uniform for the purposes of making it easier to maintain.
The ability to maintain code is very important as there are always bugs, security updates, features or simply a better way to write the code. Addition of a company wide shared library for instance.
Code quality also effects the readability of code. Most programming languages have ‘Style Guidelines’ that define the uniform aspect of the code. If the code style is agreed upon (and often the coding communities for each language have…
