Category: Uncategorized
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The Challenge of Small Ops (Part 1)
I missed a open session at DevOps days, and I’m really disappointed that I did after hearing feedback from one of the conference participant. He said many people in the session we’re advocating for eliminating operations in the small scale. I realize that the world is changing, and that operations teams need to adjust to…
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Language Importance for DevOps Engineers
First and foremost this is a biased article. These are all my opinions, and come from my working experience. Bash(or Posix shell) Importance 10/10 If you’re working with *nix and can’t toss together a simple init.d script in 5 minutes, you haven’t done enough bash. It’s everywhere, and it should still be your first automation…
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Stupid Bash Expansion Trick
I got asked a question regarding filename expansion in bash the other day, and was stumped. It turns out to be something I should have considered a long time ago, and will always keep in mind when writing a script. Question 1: What does the following script do if there is a file abc in…
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Dealing with Outages
No matter what service you’re building, at some point you can expect to have an outage. Even if your software is designed and scaled perfectly, one of your service providers may let you down, leading to a flurry of calls from customers. Plus the internet has many natural enemies in life (rodents, backhoes, and bullets),…
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Trouble Tickets: Annoying, but Useful
If you work in operations, you probably have used a ticketing system or two. They are common across the industry, and every organization has its own particular workflow. In my younger days I loathed them, since they seemed to be an impediment to me doing my job. Today, I’d describe myself as a reluctant fan.…
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Two Quick Chef Gotchas
Configuration management is a hot topic these days. Chef is one of the more popular choices, and does a fairly good job helping you maintain consistent configuration across your environment. That said it isn’t fool proof. I’ve outlined two common scenarios in which you might introduce a configuration issue. Removing a File, Package, User, or…