Devops

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. ...

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. ...

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. The mission planners (Developers in this example) failed to consider a solid delivery process to production (deployment of operators into combat). The Developers assumed Operations would do things a certain way without much testing prior to deployment. The Operations team (special operations forces) demonstrated that the assumptions made by the Developers (mission planners) were not rooted in reality. ...

I had the opportunity to present What The Military Taught Me About DevOps at the Triangle DevOps Meetup last night. It was a fantastic group of people and I fielded a lot of great feedback after speaking. One takeaway I have from the talk, is that I need to get better at speaking on diversity issues. But, that is for another time. One person asked if I would be willing to share my slides. I informed him that they were already shared but I think the notes that accompany the slides are important to share too: ...