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Category Archives for "Systems"

VMworld 2015 Prayer Time

Last year, a group of believers gathered for a brief time of prayer while at VMworld 2014. This year, I’d like to again offer believers attending VMworld 2015 the same opportunity to gather together for a time of prayer before starting the day. If you’re interested in attending, here are the details.

What: A brief time of prayer

Where: Yerba Buena Gardens, behind Moscone North (by the waterfall)

When: Monday 8/31 through Wednesday 9/2 at 7:45am (this should give everyone enough time to grab breakfast before the keynotes start at 9am)

Who: All courteous attendees are welcome, but please note that this will be a distinctly Christian-focused and Christ-centric activity. (I encourage believers of other faiths/religions to organize equivalent activities.)

Why: To spend a few minutes in prayer over the day, the conference, and the attendees

Like last year, there’s no need to RSVP or let me know that you’ll be there, although you’re welcome to do so if you’d like. There’s also no need to bring anything except an open heart and a willingness to display your faith in front of others. This is a very casual gathering of believers—we’ll gather together, share some prayer requests and needs, Continue reading

Getting to Know Robyn Bergeron, Community Architect at Ansible

robyn-bullKnowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in (and outside of!) the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.

This week we're happy to introduce you to Robyn Bergeron, who recently joined Ansible as a Community Architect. Her prior role was as a Developer Advocate at Elastic, where she worked closely with the ELK stack community. And many of us at Ansible know her from her days at Red Hat, where she was the Fedora Project Leader -- a role that her illustrious boss once himself had.

What’s your role at Ansible?

Open source communities work best when contributors are empowered and enabled to make things happen; the easier it is to contribute, the more likely they’ll continue to do so, and enjoy doing it. As a community architect, it’s my job to ensure that contributors, both long-time and new, are connected with the opportunities, ideas, tools, and people to make great things happen in the Ansible community, with minimal bureaucracy.

A good deal of my focus will Continue reading

Announcing Docker Toolbox

The fastest way to get Docker running in development written by Michael Chiang, Product Manager at Docker Inc. Today we’re announcing a new installer for Mac OS X and Windows called Docker Toolbox. We’ve been hearing again and again that … Continued

Docker Demo Webinar: FAQ

Thanks again to everyone who joined last week’s Docker Demo webinar! There were more questions than time to answer them – and we wanted to share the Q&A publicly so everyone had access to this information on their Docker journey. Don’t … Continued

How To Do DevOps Without Leaving Legacy Behind

 

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An increasingly apparent and large challenge in IT organizations is how teams can effectively modernize software development and IT operations while still operating and maintaining legacy infrastructure. Often the approach is to merely draw a line in the sand, creating an arbitrary cut-off whereby new implementations make use of the much desired DevOps and Agile methodology.

But what about the legacy environments?

Just because something is “legacy” doesn’t automatically mean that it’s twenty years old. Many so-called legacy systems were deployed mere months ago-- and on modern hardware, operating systems, and storage. For the sake of an agile organization, however, a legacy deployment or environment is anything that is not included in the new processes and approaches required for a DevOps-enabled organization.

The question remains: how can IT organizations successfully apply DevOps and Agile methodologies to existing legacy environments, and what are the benefits from doing this?

Start with the Infrastructure

Regardless of the type and variety of applications in an enterprise IT environment, there are likely many commonalities in the operating system and infrastructure components.

Manual OS build processes typically require significant admin-hours to deliver a single build. Additionally, the reliability of the result is a totally dependent Continue reading

Using Vagrant and Docker Machine Together

In this post, I’m going to show you a quick tip I used today to combine the power of Vagrant with that of Docker Machine to quickly and easily create Docker-enabled virtual machines (VMs) on your laptop. This could be useful in a variety of scenarios; I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine the best way to leverage this functionality in his or her own environment.

In my case, I needed to be able to easily create/destroy/recreate a couple of Docker-enabled VMs for a project on which I’m working. The problem I faced was that the tools I would normally use for such a task—Vagrant and Docker Machine—each had problems when used on their own:

  • Vagrant has a Docker provisioner, but I could only get it to install the latest released version of Docker. In my case, I needed to run a test version (specifically, the RC2 build of Docker 1.8.0).
  • Docker Machine has various back-end drivers that can create VMs into which Docker is provisioned, but the VMware Fusion driver for Machine only works with Boot2Docker. In my case, I needed to run Ubuntu 14.04 in the VMs.

As it turns Continue reading

Docker

written by Brian Goff, Technical Alliances at Docker, Inc. Integration allows Oracle users to easily distribute applications built and deployed in Oracle Solaris Zones Over the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with Oracle on a few … Continued

First Look: AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015

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We are happy to announce that AnsibleFest will be returning to San Francisco this November. After a sell-out AnsibleFest in New York City, we have moved the West Coast event to an even larger location. 

If you are new to Ansible, AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together hundreds of Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news. AnsibleFest is for anyone who is passionate (or becoming passionate) about Ansible.

Attendees include DevOps engineers, operations engineers, open source fans, systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers and security professionals.

Again, we are offering Super Early Bird pricing for just $275 a ticket through August 31st. Don't miss out as we are only offering a limited number of Super Early Bird tickets at this time.

We are also accepting speaker applications here.

Here is a sample of what to expect at AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015.

See all of the presentations here.

Learn More About AnsibleFest San Francisco 2015

 

Your Docker Agenda for August

Excited for Docker Global Hack Day #3 and DockerCon 2015 Europe? Us too! As you wait for these bigger Docker events, you can participate in awesome Docker meetup events and attend other Docker talks and conferences happening globally. Below is your Docker agenda for … Continued

How We Chose MongoDB for Ansible Tower System Tracking Feature

System Tracking

This is not a generic “Postgres vs. MongoDB” performance post. This post details the process of comparing Postgres vs. MongoDB with a particular use case in mind, System Tracking.

Desirable Databases Features

Postgres is a candidate database since it is already in use by Tower. MongoDB is the other database considered for an in depth analysis for many reasons including: (1) document store of the JSON structure, (2) arbitrary structure query support, (3) and the ability to run on a single machine and later scale.

Comparing the two databases begins with identifying our System Tracking requirements. What is System Tracking?

For Tower, System Tracking is time based snapshots of machine facts. Facts are key value pairs of system state. The inspiration comes from the open source Ansible. Ansible facts will be supported in System Tracking along with 3 other fact types: packages (i.e. rpm or apt-get), services (i.e. mongodb, apache2), and files (i.e. /var/log/message). We support these 3 facts as fact modules. We also want to allow for customer built modules. Facts generated by the 4 core modules plus user created modules would be stored in Tower’s System Tracking database; allowing customers to take advantage Continue reading

Getting to Know Tim Cramer, VP of Engineering at Ansible

TimC_780x300Knowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.

This week we're happy to introduce you to Tim Cramer, VP of Engineering at Ansible. Tim brings over 20 years of enterprise software experience to Ansible. He was previously at HP where he was responsible for the overall delivery of Helion Eucalyptus Cloud, managing global teams of engineering, support and IT. He also worked as an executive at Dell, Eucalyptus, and Sun Microsystems, and as an engineer at Sun and Supercomputer Systems Inc.

What’s your role at Ansible?

  • Running the development and release of Ansible Tower and managing the Ansible open source team and community efforts

  • Scaling the engineering team and increasing the ability to release products more often and with higher quality

  • Overseeing partner engineering integrations that benefit Ansible customers and users; for example, working on enhancing Windows, VMware, OpenStack, and AWS functionality

  • Understanding and prioritizing the features for Tower releases

What’s your management philosophy?
My philosophy is not unlike the great Continue reading

Thank You SysAdmins!

With SysAdmin Day coming up on Friday, July 31st, now is a great time to thank our SysAdmins for everything they do! Without them, who knows what we would do when a server is down. For setting up servers, monitoring for stability, … Continued

Intro to Docker Webinar: Q&A

Many great questions popped up in this week’s Introduction to Docker webinar where we covered the basics of the Docker technology, discussed the Continuous Integration (CI) use case and a product demo of Docker Trusted Registry and Docker Engine. Instead of keeping … Continued