Devops

In a fit of rage caused by reading yet another email in which one of our customers proposed creating a "devops team" so as to "implement" devops, I tweeted that "THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A DEVOPS TEAM." Like all slogans, there's plenty of heat to go with the light, so here's the scoop [...]

"Here are some of the DevOps tools that we use at New Relic and a few more worth mentioning."

Hosted continuous integration and deployment service built on docker.

Hosted continuous integration and deployment service built on docker.

"Sinds de dagen van de zogeheten watervalsoftwareontwikkeling hebben IT-organisaties met Agile-methoden zoals Scrum al veel gewonnen aan snelheid en flexibiliteit. Gebruikers sturen voortdurend op de door henzelf gewenste functionaliteit en zien die snel terug in productierijpe projectresultaten. Hoe zorgt u er echter vervolgens voor dat die gebruikers ook snel kunnen beschikken over die in productie genomen functionaliteit? DevOps is het antwoord om projectresultaten snel in productie te nemen en tegelijkertijd de impact en frequentie van incidenten te beperken."

"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."