Retiring the Rockstar: A Counterpoint
“You’re a rockstar!” Chances are, you’ve either a) been told this as a compliment for some work you’d done; b) heard this told to someone else for some work they’d done; or c) told someone this for some work they’d done. If you said this to someone else—I just told someone this quite recently—chances are also very likely that you had nothing but positive intentions behind this statement and your goal was to compliment them on what you saw as outstanding work. But is “rockstar” the wrong term to use? And if so, what is the right term?
Recently, Tyler Britten (a very talented professional and a former colleague when I worked as an EMC vSpecialist) posted an article titled “Time to Retire the Rockstar,” in which he draws a connection between the use of terms like “rockstar,” “superstar,” “genius,” or “guru” and the myth of the lone genius. I see his point, and don’t necessarily disagree with it. Something can be said that calling someone a rockstar (or any of the other terms listed) isn’t automatically encouraging them to “eschew teams and communities and to work alone”, but that isn’t the point of this post. Here I’d rather Continue reading
Updates Available to Popular Repos – Update Your Images
At Docker, we’re working with our open source community to build a rich ecosystem of containerized images. In the past year alone, Docker users and partners have created 100,000+ images and pulled 200+ million images from Docker Hub. We’re proud … ContinuedAnsible Simplicity Keeps Shining
When Ansible was first founded three years ago, the underlying premise was to simplify some of the complexity in the existing DevOps tools. The mere idea of needing a strong developer toolset to automate your IT infrastructure was an overwhelming concept for most. I believe this is one of the underlying reasons that the majority of the IT shops are still using home-crafted scripts to automate updates to their infrastructure and shying away from having to add more complexity to an already complex world.
The well known quote from, Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer, saying: “Less but Better”, has become somewhat of a guiding principle for Ansible. Being able to achieve in few lines of YAML script, during lunch hour what you can’t do in days of writing code with others.
In fact, not only do we apply that principle to our products in general, but to other operational things we do at Ansible, Inc. - from our internal communication to the onboarding process of new employees to how we handle customer support tickets. We are building an organization and an enterprise product based on simplicity. In fact, I’ve become a strong believer in the notion that complex Continue reading
Making STIG Automation Possible: A Technical Deep Dive
Ansible architect and craft beer connoisseur Jonathan Davila played a critical role in working with our trusted security partner MindPoint Group to get our joint automated security baseline project off the ground. With our release this week of the DISA STIG for RHEL 6, we’ve immediately improved the lives of Government IT admins that struggle to ensure their systems are compliant.
Merely building the Ansible role for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (And CentOS variants) STIG required more than writing and organizing a collection of playbooks. In order to ensure that the role actually achieved the remediation goal, we needed to validate and verify updates through a continuous integration testing process that leverages the DISA-provided SCAP/OVAL definitions.
You can learn more about the mechanics of how Jonathan and the MindPoint Group built the STIG Role, along with technical details about how to replicate this testing method in your own environment here.
Want to learn more about the how and why? Jonathan also penned a LinkedIn article with his own thoughts about why this is an important step in the right direction for any IT organization that’s concerned about automagically applying and validating security baselines.
Learn more about automated baseline testing.
Continue reading
Docker Tutorial 1 – Installing Docker
This is a casual tutorial series. We will start out first with very simple sessions on how to install Docker and use the docker run command. In future videos we will hit more advanced topics. This first video talks a … ContinuedDocker’s 2nd Birthday Wishes: Q&A with Solomon Hykes, Founder of Docker
Docker turns two this week. To celebrate the incredible contributions of our community in such a short period of time and to continue to support and grow it, we are kicking off our first ever open-source-a-thon. The goal is to … ContinuedDockerCon 2015 CFP Extended
Thank you to all who have submitted a session for DockerCon so far. We are very excited by the nearly 342 fantastic submissions we’ve received. After our initial call for papers closed on Monday, we received an overwhelming response and … ContinuedFirst Docker Maintainers Summit
It doesn’t take much during an extremely cold and snowy February to entice key Docker contributors and maintainers to get on a plane and spend a few days together at Docker HQ in (sometimes) sunny San Francisco. That’s what happened … ContinuedDocker Governance Advisory Board: 2nd meeting
On February 17th, the Docker project had its second Docker Governance Advisory Board ( DGAB ) meeting to discuss the operations of the project. As this was our second meeting, it was great to see everyone again. As a bit … ContinuedAnsible Fundamentals Webinar
If you missed our Ansible Training webinar today, or were not able to sign-up before it filled up, we were able to record the session. If you were able to attend, we hope you enjoyed it and learned about how to use Ansible.
We'll be announcing the next session soon, so follow us on Twitter for updates.
Skip ahead to 11:24 to view the training.
We also have an Ansible Tower webinar scheduled for later this month.
Ansible and MindPoint Group Deliver Automation for Government STIG Compliance
Ansible has teamed with security consultancy MindPoint Group to develop, release, and support a set of Ansible Roles that will save IT organizations considerable amounts of time when applying and maintaining security baselines such as the DISA STIG or CIS benchmark to IT environments.
Why MindPoint Group? That answer is simple. MindPoint Group has a singular focus which has led to an excellent reputation for delivering end-to-end security solutions to commercial and government clients alike. This focus, coupled with their love of Ansible, made MindPoint Group a natural choice for partnering on the development of free-and-open security baseline roles and playbooks.
The best part? This relationship is already helping Ansible users.
The first Role is for the DISA STIG on RHEL 6 (and variant systems) and is now available in Ansible Galaxy. This Role enables customers to automate the application and management of STIG-compliant systems in their environments, all the while leveraging Ansible’s agentless management framework. When applied using Ansible, the RHEL 6 STIG Role automates a significant amount of the manual and redundant scripting and remediation that IT organizations often rely on to ensure they meet the STIG OS requirements.
Releasing this important Role is just the beginning. Continue reading
Why I Love Docker… and Why You’ll Love it Too
About Me John Willis joined docker from the recent Socketplane acquisition. John is one of the founding members of the core Devopsdays team and was an early executive of both Chef and Enstratius (sold to Dell). A little history… In … ContinuedA Quick Update on OpenStack Congress
OpenStack Congress, a project aimed at providing “policy as a service” for OpenStack clouds, is a project I’ve had the privilege of being involved in from very early days. I first mentioned Congress almost a year ago, and since then the developers have been hard at work on the project. Recently, one of the lead developers posted a summary of some pretty impressive performance improvements that have been made with Congress.
I won’t repeat all the sordid details here; for all the details, I encourage you to go read the full post over at ruleyourcloud.com. Just to give you a quick highlight of some of the performance gains they’ve been able to realize, consider these numbers:
- A 500x improvement in query performance
- A 20,000x increase in data import speed
- A 6x reduction in memory overhead
Given the nature of Congress—that it must, by its very definition, import data from multiple cloud services and perform queries across that data to determine policy violations—the performance improvements seen in query performance and data import speeds are quite significant.
For the detailed explanation of how the developers were able to see such incredible performance improvements, see the full post. If you’re interested in Continue reading
Kitematic a Docker GUI joins the Docker family
We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of Kitematic, the fastest and easiest way to use Docker on the Mac. Because Docker is a tool for developers, we find that the developers in the ecosystem build the best tools for Docker. … ContinuedOur one click upgrade from dorm room to Docker – the Kitematic story.
If you didn’t already know, Kitematic is the fastest and the easiest way to use Docker on your Mac We are super excited to announce Kitematic is going to be part of Docker family. We get to work alongside the … ContinuedDocker Online Meetup: Machine, Swarm and Compose.
Last week, our very own Ben Firshman led a very well attended Docker Online meetup covering the release of three new open source tools for orchestrating distributed applications: Machine, Swarm and Compose. In addition to covering the basics of … ContinuedTiny Docker Operating Systems
In a recent post, The New Minimalist Operating Systems, I briefly described three new OSs designed with Docker in mind. I also mentioned Boot2Docker, which I considered to be the smallest (23MB) Docker-focused OS at the time. Less than two … ContinuedDocker Project’s 2nd Birthday Party Extensions & Online
In case you missed it, we recently announced that we’re organizing a global open-source-a-thon to celebrate the Docker project’s 2nd birthday. Thanks to overwhelming response and support, the event series is expanding to both online and community events! Online From … ContinuedTechnology Short Take #49
Welcome to Technology Short Take #49 (also known as Distraction-as-a-Service)! I have here for your reading pleasure an eclectic collection of links and articles from around the web, focusing on data center-related technologies. Here’s hoping you find something useful. Bring on the content!
Networking
- I love this post from Matt Oswalt on five next-gen skills for networking pros. I highly recommend you read the entire post, but in short the five skills Matt recommends are software skills (which includes configuration management and software development tools like Git), Linux, deep protocol knowledge, hypervisor and container networking, and IPv6. What’s really interesting to me is the (completely uncoordinated) alignment between Matt’s list of skills for networking pros and the list I provided to virtualization pros in a series of recent VMUG presentations (refer to slide 15, but the list is software development basics, Linux, automation/orchestration, and public cloud services). What does this mean? It tells me that some skills—specifically, Linux, automation/configuration management, software development concepts—are going to be essential for all new IT pros in the near future. If you want to stay relevant, regardless of your current “silo,” it’s time to evolve.
- Carl Niger has a write-up on the introduction Continue reading