"Where does Packer, the image creation tool, fit into your workflow?"

Packer definitions for vagrant VirtualBox and VMware baseboxes. These are the vagrant baseboxes I use for my own personal projents. This project is run against a private Jenkins instance, and as template definitions are added and/or updated, links to the generated images are added below.

I've been interviewing candidates for a DevOps opening that Interactive Intelligence has available and I keep getting asked by candidates, 'What does DevOps mean to you?' If you were to google 'What is devops?' you'll find pages and pages of blogs and articles answering just that. I've read a few of them but I still find myself struggling to give a clear answer. I think the trouble with anwering this question is that people generally expect a 2-3 sentence answer and it's difficult to encapsulate all my thoughts on the subject that concisely. Another issue is that when I'm talking about DevOps, I feel like my attempts at explaining it come off as if it's some magical, fundamental, paradigm shift that exploded onto the scene and if followed will lead to peace on earth and an end to all hunger.

Whether devops consulting is a valid thing. Here's my take

Orchestrate From Above. Most software does not run on a single machine. Ansible parallelizes complex multi-tier rollouts across app servers, databases, monitoring servers, and load balancers.

Vagabond is an alternative take on the Vagrant tool, but one based on LXC rather than virtual machines after the realisation that VMs can be quite slow. Maybe worth a look if you run Linux and find lots of performance or stability issues with virtual machines.

Vagrant RackSpace Cloud Provider This is a Vagrant 1.1+ plugin that adds a RackSpace Cloud provider to Vagrant, allowing Vagrant to control and provision machines within RackSpace cloud. Note: This plugin requires Vagrant 1.1+.

"Microsoft provides virtual machine disk images to facilitate website testing in multiple versions of IE, regardless of the host operating system. With a single command, you can have IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9 and IE10 running in separate virtual machines."

Using Vagrant for Continuos Integration

"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... "

The DevOps team is "a growing group of people practicing a new way of combining development and system administration for more speed, quality, revenues and fun."