Devops

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."

"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... "

Using Vagrant for Continuos Integration

"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."

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+.

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.

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.

There is lots of talk about what DevOps is and means, even a Wikipedia page, to which I may soon give some much needed love. However, a friend recently asked if I knew anyone worth hiring for a "devops" role, and I found myself asking clarifying questions about the sort of person he had in mind. Seemed worth writing down. The friend was looking for engineers. So what does it mean for an engineer to be devops-y?

Security + DevOps Automatic Server Hardening

... created a tool which will allows their customer-facing engineers to programmatically deploy infrastructure for new customers and to update the infrastructure of existing customers through a single, defined interface. This tool uses Consul as the foundation for continuous deployment to these environments. Consul's DNS, Key-Value store, and GUI have given DeltaForce a simple mechanism for reliably delivering software.

An excellent piece on leadership, mentoring and the soft skills required to help build a high functioning devops team.

Why tools like Docker, Vagrant, and Ansible are hotter than ever

Discover what top companies are using Learn about the tech stack behind some of the world's best software companies. See which tools and services they use, and how they're using them.

With CloudSlang you can orchestrate popular DevOps technologies, such as Docker and CoreOS in an agentless manner. You can also define custom workflows that are reusable, shareable and easy to understand.