Devops

... 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.)

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.