Adam Bertram
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Adam Bertram
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Review: SaltStack shifts devops into high gear
The only sane and efficient way to manage a large numbers of servers—or even a few dozen, if they change often—is through automation. Automation tools have to be learned and mastered, so they exact a significant up-front cost, but they dramatically reduce the administrative burden in the long run. Perhaps most important, they provide a staunch line of defense against the fatal fat-fingered mistake, which even the most sophisticated cloud operators struggle to avoid.Ease of use. Configuration management is simple with SaltStack. Because Salt uses the YAML configuration format, states are can be written quickly and easily. YAML state descriptions are structured well, with solid readability. The support for Mako, JSON, Wempy, and Jinja allows developers to extend Salt’s capabilities. The availability of built-in modules makes it easy to configure and manage states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Review: SaltStack shifts devops into high gear
The only sane and efficient way to manage a large numbers of servers—or even a few dozen, if they change often—is through automation. Automation tools have to be learned and mastered, so they exact a significant up-front cost, but they dramatically reduce the administrative burden in the long run. Perhaps most important, they provide a staunch line of defense against the fatal fat-fingered mistake, which even the most sophisticated cloud operators struggle to avoid.Ease of use. Configuration management is simple with SaltStack. Because Salt uses the YAML configuration format, states are can be written quickly and easily. YAML state descriptions are structured well, with solid readability. The support for Mako, JSON, Wempy, and Jinja allows developers to extend Salt’s capabilities. The availability of built-in modules makes it easy to configure and manage states.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Discover the power of Bash on Windows
Microsoft Windows may be the dominant player on the desktop, but the rapidly increasing open source software market—especially for admin and dev tools—clearly favors Linux. Not to mention the mobile market, where Android uses Linux variants. If you’re a developer on Windows, the drumbeat to get hip to Linux capabilities keeps getting louder.Over the years, Microsoft has introduced various workarounds for using Linux capabilities on Windows, such as PowerShell with SSH and Cygwin and MSYS. Running Linux inside a virtual machine is another option. But VMs consume a significant amount of resources and don’t provide a first-class Linux experience, as you can’t edit local files or get full access to local drives, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Must-have devops tools for Windows admins
Without automation, there would be no devops. How organizations implement automation—from continuous delivery to automated testing to release pipelines—differs wildly, but the fundamental divergence in approaches begins at the operating system. When it comes to Windows vs. Linux, devops is a bit different.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Review: Ansible shows the beef
At a time when the configuration management market was dominated by Puppet and Chef, an open source project called Ansible emerged with a simpler approach to automating IT environments. An agentless system that was easy to learn, Ansible quickly earned a name for itself. Before long, the developers behind the project formed a company to offer commercial support. That company -- first known as AnsibleWorks, then Ansible -- was acquired by open source leader Red Hat in October 2015.Docker. Ansible offers modules for building and running Docker containers, orchestrating containers across a Swarm cluster, and managing Docker images. There are advantages to building Docker images from Ansible playbooks instead of Dockerfiles. When you build an image from a Dockerfile, the application or environment can only be deployed in a Docker container. But when you build an image using Ansible playbooks, the environments can easily be replicated on any infrastructure -- bare metal, cloud instance, virtual machine, or Vagrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Review: Ansible shows the beef
At a time when the configuration management market was dominated by Puppet and Chef, an open source project called Ansible emerged with a simpler approach to automating IT environments. An agentless system that was easy to learn, Ansible quickly earned a name for itself. Before long, the developers behind the project formed a company to offer commercial support. That company -- first known as AnsibleWorks, then Ansible -- was acquired by open source leader Red Hat in October 2015.Docker. Ansible offers modules for building and running Docker containers, orchestrating containers across a Swarm cluster, and managing Docker images. There are advantages to building Docker images from Ansible playbooks instead of Dockerfiles. When you build an image from a Dockerfile, the application or environment can only be deployed in a Docker container. But when you build an image using Ansible playbooks, the environments can easily be replicated on any infrastructure -- bare metal, cloud instance, virtual machine, or Vagrant.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Review: Chef 12 fires up devops
Two of the most important tasks in a datacenter are server provisioning and configuration management. At one time, administrators spent a significant amount of time physically deploying servers and network infrastructure, followed by even more minutes and hours manually configuring hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Then they spent an additional chunk of the day troubleshooting and fixing the errors they introduced by configuring all of these systems with their fat fingers.Chef clients are generally installed on Windows machines using the MSI package. Today, a number of resources specific to Windows come with Chef out-of-the-box. For example:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Review: Chef 12 fires up devops
Two of the most important tasks in a datacenter are server provisioning and configuration management. At one time, administrators spent a significant amount of time physically deploying servers and network infrastructure, followed by even more minutes and hours manually configuring hundreds or even thousands of nodes. Then they spent an additional chunk of the day troubleshooting and fixing the errors they introduced by configuring all of these systems with their fat fingers.Chef clients are generally installed on Windows machines using the MSI package. Today, a number of resources specific to Windows come with Chef out-of-the-box. For example:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Essential Azure automation tricks for Windows admins
Any organization making use of the cloud will want to leverage the power of infrastructure automation. This holds true whether you’re tapping Amazon Web Serices, Microsoft Azure, or any other cloud service. Automating repetitively executed tasks will save considerable labor and reduce human error.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Get started with Windows PowerShell DSC
In today's cloud-centric world, we’re seeing an explosion in the number of servers under IT management. Virtual machines made servers cheap, and containers will push prices down further. As a result, businesses can afford to deploy a server for every new need, but they can no longer afford to manage servers individually. Your servers no longer garner individual attention but are simply soldiers in a huge resource pool, dutifully fulfilling the resource requests of the data center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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The power of PowerShell: An intro for Windows Server admins
Until recently, a clear delineation existed between Windows system administrators and developers. You’d never catch a system administrator writing a single line of code, and you’d never catch a developer bringing up a server. Neither party dared to cross this line in Windows environments. Nowadays, with the devops movement spreading like wildfire, that line is fading away.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)