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System administration is in a sad state. It in a mess. I'm not complaining about old-school sysadmins. They know how to keep systems running, manage update and upgrade paths. This rant is about containers, prebuilt VMs, and the incredible mess they cause because their concept lacks notions of "trust" and "upgrades".

We have a variety of tutorial videos all related to DevOps. Our goal is to make the lives of SysAdmins everywhere easier by helping them use the tools that developers have been using for a long time, as well as helping developers realize how to solve some of the issues that Operations has traditionally had to deal with. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know!

"I have worked in environments where reacting was the "normal" way to approach issues and being proactive was just a waste of time... *facepalm* The seemingly simple idea of changing the workplace culture from reactive to proactive was hard to pitch, let alone implement on my own. 18 months ago, I knew there was a better way of doing things and I was determined to find something. I had been watching developers implement Agile Development processes with great envy and I was starting to see concepts that would have great outcomes if adopted in a traditional operations environment. Finally having something tangible to explore I started looking into Agile Operations, which led me DevOps. Lurking in the shadows for a while, I digested as much as I could of the DevOps movement. I thought it was  time to talk to some of the developers and get them on board. 6 months on and here we are... "

One of the tenets of devops is sharing. But how do you best facilitate sharing in your own organisation? This essay and talk go into detail about the importance of communication, tips for asking questions and other good advice.

As a developer and sometimes system administrator, one of the scariest things I ever encounter is a server that's been running for ages which has seen multiple upgrades of system and application software. Why? Because an old system inevitably grows warts. They start as one-time hacks during outages. A quick edit to a config file saves the day. "We'll put it back into Chef later," we say, as we finally head off to sleep after a marathon fire fighting session.

Vagrant automates creation and provisioning of virtual machines within VirtualBox via the command line, whilst also allowing for easy distribution and reuse across multiple projects. In this article, I'm going to look at how it can make life considerably easier when dealing with development environments.

Juju is DevOps DistilledTM. Through the use of charms, juju provides you with shareable, re-usable, and repeatable expressions of DevOps best practices. You can use them unmodified, or easily change and connect them to fit your needs. Deploying a charm is similar to installing a package on Ubuntu: ask for it and it's there, remove it and it's completely gone.

Webistrano is a easy-to-use graphical deployment tool. It is based on the deployment tool Capistrano and offers a substantial graphic interface including user-management and logging. It lets you manage projects and their stages like test, production, and staging with different settings. Those stages can then be deployed with Capistrano through Webistrano.

Kibana is an open source (MIT License), browser based interface to Logstash and ElasticSearch. Once you have those in place, Kibana is a breeze to install and configure (really, I swear). And as you'll see below, none too hard to operate. Check out the screenshots for an idea of what Kibana is all about.

During the Devopsdays in Hambourg, one of the most recuring discussion was about "packaging vs non-packaging, when and what?" I won't try to convince people on what do do when, neither will I say I have the absolute best solution, this post just illustrates the solution I implemented with @zipkid. Some points aren't finished yet, not implemented... or we have not yet decided which direction to follow.

Following is my grouping of tools that i have learned/used as a sysad and devops person at ThoughtWorks while maintaining our distributed infrastructure, setting up our private cloud installations, and in many different client gigs .

The Podcast where DevOps chefs do battle

I'm going to assume you've got a Puppet module already on GitHub. To save messing around with bundler on your local machine, I recommend installing puppet-lint and rspec-puppet as system gems while you're getting this all set up.

Although Puppet Enterprise gives you the wonderful tools to automate your Linux administration, you still cannot deploy a server with a single command. With the following script, you can. Why is this so cool? When, for instance, a new Tomcat server is needed, I create a DNS entry for that server and give a single command and get some coffee. Before it has cooled down enough to drink, the developer has his Tomcat-app deployed and the server is operational. (It takes about 8 minutes to get from scratch to a fully operational server.)

Reading through the documentation, I saw it mention Puppet and Chef which both appeared to be some sort of witchcraft that allowed you to automatically configure and setup these virtualised servers. Bingo. Easy server configuration management.