Updated Solutions to Classic Challenges
A personal website dedicated to helping IT professionals review where we've been, where we are, and maybe where we are headed.
HashiCorp’s Packer has proven to be a useful tool for those working towards those management goals. Packer in an AWS Cloud enables administrators to create customized AMIs by using Packer’s scripting process. This blog post walks through the installation of Packer on an Amazon Linux EC2 Instance.
Read MoreThere are a number of good practices to follow when setting up and maintaining systems. Some of these rules are obvious and some not so obvious. One of these rules is to make sure your monitoring tools have no dependency on the thing being monitored. While this may seem obvious, lots of organizations still make this mistake. Sometimes it’s not even clear to them that they’ve created such a dependency. Microsoft ran into this very issue last week during an Azure outage situation. As Mary Jo Foley reported in her All About Microsoft Column, the dashboards used by Microsoft to alert customers about the outage were behind the same authentication system that was having issues. If a company with the size and resources of Microsoft can miss this, then so can the average operations, DevOps, and SRE Teams supporting applications.
Read MoreGitLab is a powerful, all-in-one package for use as a source code repository as well as a full continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI/CD) suite. Using GitLab on AWS for implementing CI/CD tasks is made possible by using an EC2 Instance that’s allocated for use by GitLab as a “runner.” Runners execute the commands included in the pipeline definition. This document walks through the steps used to install the runner software. The software is installed on a typical AWS EC2 Instance running Amazon Linux 2 as an OS. If you’d like to follow along using this blog in a simple proof-of-concept (PoC), it’s acceptable to use choose a free tier option.
Read MoreIt’s been said that a craftsman is only as good as their tools. For developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs the most relied upon tool is the IDE. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment , is an editor where code is written and sometimes executed. IDEs often include syntax checkers, testing and debugging features, and maybe even code formatting capabilities. Sometimes a specific programming language will ship with an IDE. This was the case back in the day with languages such as GW Basic, Borland’s Turbo Pascal, and Microsoft’s Visual Basic. AWS’s Cloud9 is an editor I thought I’d look into a little closer.
Read MoreThis blog post describes the steps used to install Ansible on Ubuntu for use with AWS.
Read MoreThe Cfn-Linter extension for the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (hereafter referred to as vscode) editor can be a major help to anyone asked to write AWS ClouidFormation Templates. Using a linter may be new to some. Linters are like Grammarly for your code. A good linter will alert you to mistakes before you attempt to compile or otherwise execute your code. Cfn-lint is like Grammarly for CloudFormation. This blog posts describes that install process.
Read MoreCFN-Python-Linter is a tool used to validate AWS CloudFormation templates before they are used. Having the ability to validate the code before finding errors at runtime is a crucial time-saving tool. This blog post details the installation of CFN-Python-Linter on Ubuntu Linux 19.10.
Read MoreQuick steps for installing Microsoft VSCode on Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 using the GUI Tools included in the OS.
Read MoreThis is Part 3 of a multi-part series. This article will dig deeper into adding tasks such as Product Backlog Items to the board. I’ll also describe a little more my approach to Scrum as I’m both the customer and the developer. In Scrum terms, I’m both the Product Owner and the Scrum Team.
Read MoreThe work for my Long Term app development and hosting project needs an effective method of tracking the work. I’m a single person, so I want something simple and light weight. Having studied Agile and SCRUM, that’s where I’m leaning. Give me a Kanban board where I can track a backlog, Work in progress, and done items, and I’ll be happy.
Read MoreI continue to be on the hunt for an easy to use web development language that talks to databases. I have a couple of ideas I’d like to work on, and I haven’t coded in a while. Moreover, I’d like to create some simple apps that use web code and databases to try different hosting methodologies. It also gives me an opportunity to experiment with various CI/CD tools and Agile tracking apps.
Read MoreLog onto the AMI via SSH
Go to the log folder: type: cd /opt/bitnami/var/log
Get the username . type : sudo more pre-start.log |grep user
Get the password . type: sudo more pre-start.log |grep password
Cloud Field Day 6 will take place in Silicon Valley September 25-27 2019. Cloud Field Day is a focused version of the Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day series of events. While Tech Field Day covers a broad array of IT topics, Cloud Field Day places the spotlight on cloud technology vendors. The events gather a group of independent delegates from the tech blogosphere to hear presentations from emerging and established technology vendors. The vendors often demonstrate either new products or features of existing offerings. The vendors I’m most interested in hearing from is HashiCorp. This could be a mini-recap of HashiCorp announcements made at their recent HashiConf conference, a deep dive on an existing product, or maybe an announcement of some sort. The beauty of Tech Field Day is that you never know.
Read MoreThe DevOps movement is still very much alive and finding its way from the commercial world into the Government. Government adoption, like in other places tend to find themselves on a spectrum between setting up and managing a CI/CD pipeline to full on broken down silos and self-managing teams. It’s because of this range of experiences that I decided to compile a quick cheat sheet that help folks cram on the subject if they find that their traditional silo is being disrupted by a DevOps initiative.
Read MoreLast week I was honored to be a guest on the Datanauts Podcast. Episode 149 is titled “Entering The DevOps World With Azure DevOps.“ It is, as you can probably guess, about VSTS / Azure DevOps.
Read MoreMicrosoft announced on Sept 10th that Visual Studio Team Services would soon become Azure DevOps. Along with the name change are a few alterations to the service names. VSTS users shouldn't feel too out of place. It feels like the same house with the furniture slightly rearranged. So far, I only see upside to the changes.
Read MoreChat tools vendors Slack and Atlassian last week announced a partnership where Atlassian's two ChatOps apps, Hipchat and Stride would be shut down and the existing users could migrate onto Slack. Atlassian also agreed to a financial investment in Slack as part of the terms. A lack of competition in the ChatOps space seems detrimental on the surface, however, it could be the best thing for the sector long term.
Read MoreThe DevOps movement has been great at increasing inclusion among the various roles in IT, breaking down solos and creating groups capable of deploying code. But one group seems to have been left out of the mix - DBAs. For whatever reason, DBA tools have been slow to build in features synonymous with DevOps such as source control.
The Phoenix Project and DevOps Handbook spend a great deal of time discussing Flow and how a we’ll run organization will look to eliminate blockages at choke points. Often these blockages occur during hand-offs. The best way to avoid hand-offs is to build teams with all members needed to make a deployable package.
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