Recent Accomplishments

I feel like I should say I don’t like to toot my own horn. But, if I don’t toot it who will? December and January were very busy months for me and February is definitely going to be busy. You should always be working outside your personal and professional comfort zones. Last month, a DZone editor reached out to me asking to write a piece for the DZone DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation guide....

February 3, 2017 · 2 min · Chris Short

Find EC2 Instances That Are Missing Tags

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....

January 26, 2017 · 2 min · Chris Short

GitLab Annoyance: Private to Public Repos

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: [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....

January 23, 2017 · 2 min · Chris Short
Operation Eagle Claw

Military Lessons Applied to DevOps: Operation Eagle Claw

As part of preparing for my talk at DevOpsDays Detroit, I did a significant amount of research into military failures. It was hard to find a military failure that did not evoke an emotional response or political discussion. But, I was prepared to talk about two: The 1961 Goldsboro B-52 Crash and the failed Iran hostage rescue, Operation Eagle Claw. In the case of Operation Eagle Claw, you can draw a comparison to the old IT silo mentality of Dev and Ops being two different teams with very different objectives....

January 18, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short

What I Learned in 2016

A former co-worker and now friend used to have a tagline, “Everyday is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact nearly every time I learn something new. 2016 brought a lot of new knowledge and skill sets into my ever-expanding arsenal of tools. Surprisingly, 2016 brought a mix of both soft skills and technical skills. Let’s review some of the things I picked up during this journey around the sun:...

January 1, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short