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The other day my Vice President asked me a question, “What would it take to turn a good SysAdmin into a DevOps engineer?” He followed it up with, “Don’t spend more than ten minutes thinking about it.” He was not disappointed when I told him the next day I am spending way more than ten minutes on answering the question. This is a hard question for me to answer. This is a question that you won’t know if your answer is right for at least six months. ...

Disclaimer: These are real world experiences I have had within organizations that I have been employed by. Identifying information is intentionally anonymous. If you think you are in one of these organizations please consider keeping that to yourself for the sake of others. A lot of people think that DevOps, Cloud Native, Agile, GROWS, etc. are all rainbows and roses. You start small and work your way up to full blown operations or you decide as an organizational unit to change. These are the two patterns associated with a Jedi-type maturation process of DevOps. What if I told you that, like in Star Wars, DevOps has a dark side? I have seen the light side everyone thinks of and have carried the red lightsaber as well. Let’s walk into the cave on Dagobah together. ...

Since the release of Apple’s iOS 9, iPhone and iPad owners are able to install content blockers. These content blockers are often referred to as ad blockers. Providing content blocking functionality through third party apps is a reasonable request. Apple has had this functionality in iOS since 16 September 2015. As a user of content blockers on the desktop, I jumped at the opportunity to install one on my mobile devices. I have been rotating them in and out of service for well over a year and a half. ...

The team here was trying to align AWS resources for billing by using Tags. Seems easy enough but we were having issues trying to figure out which EC2 instances were not tagged. We also wanted to find EC2 instances that are missing a ROLE tag. We searched high and low and found that several people needed a solution. We tried to cobble something together with the AWS CLI and then Ansible. We could not come up with a viable solution. So we did what any could DevOps team should do; we opened a ticket with AWS Support. ...

I was working on a new Ansible role last week and was having problems with Test Kitchen. The issue I was having was that Test Kitchen was unable to pull in dependencies from GitLab for the Ansible role I was developing. Here is the error message I was seeing: 1 [WARNING]: - rsyslog was NOT installed successfully: - command git clone https://gitlab.logicnow.com/ansible-roles/rsyslog.git rsyslog failed in directory /tmp/tmpEaRVAA (rc=128) I realized that on our internal, private GitLab server a repo needed to be changed from Private to Public. I did not have rights on the repo so I pinged a co-worker who did. Once the repo was public, for some reason, Test Kitchen was still unable to pull in the role. ...