Devops Mastery

A lot of people new to automation are very nervous about letting a script or program like Chef change a production system. That fear can really slow the advance of a DevOps movement. But ignoring those people's fears is not the answer. So here are some tips and tricks to get everyone, including yourself, to be more confident about writing world changing scripts. Whenever possible create virtual environments. The use of virtual machines or cloud servers gives you considerably more options and...

Bob from Minneapolis sent us some great feedback and a couple of great questions. In this post we are going to tackle communicating what scripts are available and what they do. I spend a lot of my time as a consultant writing up documentation. At most sites I am pretty sure the work is lost before I get out the door on my last day. So how did I try to handle this before as a Tech Lead? To be completely honest it always seems to be hit or miss. I have never found a single solution that works...

Everyone loves a new toy. New tools help us do our jobs better, faster and more accurately. Which is great when you understand exactly what you want the tool to do for you. How often does that really happen though? As an Enterprise Architect I am asked on a regular basis to help companies deploy tools. The problem I run into the most is they don't completely understand what the tools can do for them. They know it will fix one problem but may not realize that it could be fixing others. Then...

If you are really going to master DevOps you need to master communications. At least the ability to clearly motivate and pull people into the discussion and the goal you are trying to achieve. Spending an extra fifteen or twenty minutes writing an E-Mail can save you days and sometimes weeks of discussions, arguments and apologies. I have a lot of tips about how to be more effective in communicating ideas but today I am going to give you my top six. What is the goal of your communications? A...

What follows are the criteria I use to determine what to script or automate first, second, and so on. It's another of the "it depends" questions that never have an easy answer. I will try to help you make some rational decisions but ultimately it's your world to live and you need to decide. The thing I see everyone want to do first is automate and that takes the longest to do. That task takes the better part of a week to complete because you are constantly getting pulled in a hundred...

Automated Deployment or Automated Build tools are all complicated to give a true evaluation. Before you even try to evaluate the tools, working through the complete process manually is normally the best place to start. You need to understand how the deployment process works before you can figure out what tool will meet your needs. Things to take note of is the tests you will need to run, the operating systems involved, and how you plan to do the deployments to production. You are trying to...

Before we begin this discussion remember this one thing while you read this; what you use to manage code is less important than making sure you manage it. Management in this context means version tracking, an ability to roll back changes in code, and being able to compare two versions of the code in question. The time people spend trying to track which is the latest version of a backed up file far exceeds the time it takes to learn any repository management tool. Wasting time arguing the...

If you think there are a lot of tools to configure your systems you haven't looked at the tools available to monitor your stuff. The set is so large that it is easy to get overwhelmed. So again in this article I am going to give you a list that I use to narrow the field. Then I am going to give you a list of my favorites. Is it agent, agentless, or hybrid? As with most configuration management tools this question cuts both ways. The best in this class of tools with agents have well...

Configuration Management DevOps Tools are plentiful. So we will start this primer off with what I look for in a tool and why. Then we will talk about my current top paid and open source choices. When I am evaluating new tools in this class look at the following things: * Is it OS restricted? If I need to manage Windows Machines and it only supports Linux then the solution obviously won't work. * Does it support the application platform we need to support? This is generally more of an...