Elegant deployment with Fabric and Puppet. Loom does the stuff Puppet doesn't do well or at all: bootstrapping machines, giving them roles, deploying Puppet code and installing reusable Puppet modules. It's useful for both serverless and master/agent Puppet installations.

DevOps is evolving from what started as little more than a rally cry, into a culture for continuous delivery of IT services. As more pieces of the puzzle fall into place, we understand that DevOps is primarily a matter of human collaboration -- assisted, but not encompassed by, certain tools and technologies. This essay is my take on DevOps, and why I think it is about embracing distributed, autonomous operational methods that support scalable human-computer processes.

An Opscode Chef knife plugin to manage Chef Servers. Currently only bootstrapping new Chef Servers is supported (on Amazon's EC2) but node data backup and restore is planned.

Interview with Patrick Debois

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.

This is the official Opscode Knife plugin for HP Cloud. This plugin gives knife the ability to create, bootstrap and manage instances in the HP Cloud.

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.

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.

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.

Whoever has used Puppet on production servers has probably lived, at least once, the uncomfortable situation when a change on Puppet manifests has introduced "unwanted effects" on target nodes if not real failures.

... things can be put right with Vagrant, a tool to create and distribute virtualized environments and Puppet, a tool which helps you with your configuration management. This article will illustrate their use with an example of how to construct a simple Java web application stack.

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.

The Podcast where DevOps chefs do battle

Nice writeup of one organisations adoption of devops ideas, in particular to help improve the quality and maintainability of deployed software.

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 .

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.

Infrastructure Anywhere - seedbank

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.)