Last week, I went to a comedy club (been over a decade) to see KillTony comedians and it was the peak of my two month fascination. Three days later, Tony did some of his set at the MSG Trump Rally. Thanks for the laughs, but now that I have to explain why you’re funny, it means you are not anymore: it was a gut-punchline straight to the Paradox of Tolerance and an unsubscribe.
Death to pet .env! Your configuration variables deserve proper local management during refactoring. I contributed my best practices for a .envrc boilerplate to the direnv Wiki, but I will augment the background and add bonus tips.
Web browser choice is often locked to Operating System vendor bundling, defaults, and convenience at the cost of choice, privacy, and innovation paid for by data mining and advertising where you are the product. For the software developer, tester, and operator, this is an essential tool need: learn how to elegantly enable web browser choice.
Most mornings start with the question, “what’s the temperature?” I am a privacy minded technologist who has casually researched home automation for decades. Yesterday, I achieved a private, controllable Internet of Things (IoT) setup that is flexible, inexpensive, and hackable. This beach head is the convergence of embedded devices running Linux (Raspberry Pi 4b), weather sensors communicating over Zigbee, and Candlestick 2.0 built on WebThings.io.
Domain Name Service (DNS) is the fundamental building block of every service. Operators love traditions: intranet IPv4 addresses, creating subnet, VLAN, and final octet conventions documented on the NetOps wiki before delegating DNS. When DNS is maintained through pet operations via a help desk API, developers become frustrated. Hence the long standing need for DNS GitOps.
For my 2020-1 holiday break, I decided my next personal project would be to rebuild my home infrastructure on containers. I’d been inspired by a recent discovery of LinuxServer.io, where open source projects are built and run as containers. While I have a burning desire to better my Kubernetes practice, not enough of the world delivers software as a Helm chart, so merely running everything as containers would be a good intermediate step. Let me share my first six steps with examples…
Democracy is a process: this past Wednesday was another test of United States democracy and a reckoning of our current administration’s dangerous tactics to stay in power. This has been another disheartening, depressing, embarrassing week in our enduring COVID-19 imposed lock down, but an older threat, the disease of poor thinking, was evident.
Two factor authentication is an important safeguard for all of your accounts and it has proven itself by protecting one of the largest software engineering organizations in the world from breach. In order to easily control your safety and privacy without resorting to cloud service providers, let’s explore how to adopt dynamic passwords and avoid outsourcing your credentials!
In the past three months, the soul of America has been laid bare in increasing amounts as we address our society’s response to our impaired health, economic, and political processes. There is a single crisis in all of this: our attitude as citizens to come together and solve any problem. America has been divided and exploited by those who profit by perpetuating the current system of inequalities of our society.
Some helpful resources for learning and understanding our global pandemic, which I hope unites us in achieving a global, human perspective: we’re all in this together.
Version Control is an essential tool making your work reproducible and visible, which can unlock profound amplifying effects of your contributions. As operators grow into developers, they can build toward state of the art GitOps!
What is an Advocate and what is it in context of Developer Relations (DevRel)? After more than twenty years, I have returned to the realm of DevRel: so what has changed and what has remained the same?
My long time fantasy has been to demonstrate an entire CI/CD pipeline with continuous operations of applications to discuss behavior driven operations and testing as monitors.
The call for this happened over and over at DevOpsDays to answer: how does one learn DevOps, practice site reliability engineering, or have a full application lifecycle environment?
So let’s create a minimal viable product BTD scenario of my DevOps Automation system, extend it to prefix Governance and suffix Management, and then drive maturity to illustrate and discuss best practices.
For those of you new to automation, it can be overwhelming on first exposure to handle every link in the chain to launch your first Nutanix Calm blueprint. Many Calm Marketplace blueprints leverage Linux, cloud-init, and SSH keypairs to enable security best-practices for composable infrastructure as code.
From September 23, 2015 to May 26, 2016, I took hiatus from my personal blog to explore, explain, and write a number of DevOps articles for my employer on the Calm.io blog. Nutanix acquired Calm.io and I am still part of the Nutanix Calm team, but I’m re-posting these articles on my personal blog since the originals are no longer directly accessible. I am also enhancing them to clarify language, add learnings, and append significant developments as postscripts.
The opening of my first Calm.io DevOps article started with:
Let me share what I’ve learned on my journey to DevOps: it is a culturally rendered term and it has a different meaning for everyone.
In that article, I go on to define DevOps and explain the term. Let me share my experience to easily chart the journey of progressive stages to DevOps maturity.
Why do we need DevOps when IT and Operations succeed in their responsibility for security and uptime, using administrative tools to maintain, backup, patch, and restore those systems achieving a “keep the lights on” goal? Because the operations domain must be documented, democratized, and distributed to achieve agility so Operations returns to become a business force multiplier. Let me demonstrate that traditional values for long lived infrastructure and their retroactive justification do not apply when progressing to a DevOps mindset.
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on May 26, 2016 at http://calm.io/2016/05/26/reconciling-configuration-management-and-immutable-infrastructure/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on May 24, 2016 at http://calm.io/2016/05/24/configuration-management-in-the-devops-world/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.
A new breed of operating systems adopt declarative configuration management for an interesting hybrid! OS maintenance of long-lived servers remains a challenge for our “mutable” infrastructure.
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on December 28, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/12/28/demystifying-continuous-integration-delivery-and-deployment/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for more perspective!
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on November 3, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/11/03/infrastructure-as-code-and-calm-blueprints/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018.
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on October 20, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/10/20/why-is-devops-so-hard/, and slightly enhanced on February 27, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for significant developments!
For a term that is not even six years old, DevOps remains a mysterious pursuit for many software engineering organizations. Let me define DevOps to help you understand and chart your own journey. Hint: it is a cultural term!
This Calm.io blog recap was originally written and posted by me on September 23, 2015 at http://calm.io/2015/09/23/i-dream-of-devops-but-what-is-devops/, and slightly enhanced on February 18, 2018, be sure to see the Postscript for significant developments!
The past: desktop builds uploaded to the FTP server; the present: global artifact delivery networks. Release management and artifact repositories are they way we deliver software and infrastructure today.
Database configuration management tools allow us version the database and treat it like code! We want DevOps, not mysterious, hidden, hand crafted DBA (pet) ops whenever possible. Another flashback to 1998.
PowerPoint and other proprietary slide-ware, bah! We already have a universal, open system for communication called the web with a markup language for information display and navigation, so let’s explore presentation applications that produce web content.
A flashback to 2007 with a tangible artifact in my journey to infrastructure as code: building the LAMP stack with Phing.
In these early years of containers, “heavy containers” represent a typical approach which resembles virtual machines, includes the operating system user land, and desires configuration management. Does this starting point represent the opposite of container promise and the journey to immutable infrastructure?
What happens when you find the same macro and micro pattern in your automation diagram? You reinforce your goals to improve code flow and service design on the way to test driven development!
#shipit and #failfast: I want to share and discuss the DevOps Automation Diagram for continuous deployment. Via open source and this blog, we can elevate the state of our software engineering and service design!
Wonderful accomplishments kicked-off my Infrastructure as Code project: one should start with a map of the world before deciding where to focus, but it is even better when you can optimize and render a new map in real-time!
Mark is a DevOps leader with pioneering work on the world’s largest Internet real-time event and web sites across software and hardware operations, technical and field product management, as well as content and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on agile people and software development along with system design and life cycle thinking: he can build, secure, scale, and manage teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while nurturing their continuous improvement.
What does one do when laid off? You need to scratch that itch and address the things that are in the back of your head and occasionally keep you awake at night. Technical dreams and technical debt follow as I start my Infrastructure as Code blog.
TBD: Entity Relationship Diagram
classDiagram
DanPatrick <|-- Museum
DanPatrick <|-- State
DanPatrick <|-- Church
DanPatrick <|-- Party
DanPatrick: +State.AssistantGov
DanPatrick: +Party.Republican
DanPatrick: +Museum.PreservationBoard
DanPatrick: Serve(Citizens)
DanPatrick: Censor(Book)
Book <|-- Church
class Book {
+TeachHistory(Citizens)
-Bias(Citizens)
}
class Church {
+Religion
+Teach(Religion)
+Burn(Book)
}
State <|-- Education
State <|-- Party
class State {
+Texas
+LawMaker()
+Separation(Church)
+History
}
class Party {
+Republican
+Policy(self)
-Policy(CRT)
}
class Museum {
+History
Mission(Education)
}
Citizens <|-- Church
Citizens <|-- State
class Citizens {
-BiasforHarmony
Education(History)
Read(Book)
}
Church <|-- Education
Education <|-- History
class Education {
+Teach(History)
+Serve(Citizens)
}
class History {
+Truth(academic.proof)
-Myth(legend)
}
History <|-- Slavery
class Slavery {
+Opress(Citizens)
}
Be transparent with questions and scoring; team should only compare similar; this is informative, not punitive Get management to assist in adoption. Over time, questions may be added or change, scoring may be tweaked
Career as a Feedback Loop: serial DevOps? Nomadic ramblings on the attention economy of cloud, web, Internet native
After graduation with my B.S. Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, I began my search for work. It was during a recession. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, I sent out over a hundred resumes with customized cover letters.