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Bootstrapping Servers into Ansible
As part of a lab rebuild I’ve been doing over the last few weeks (funny how hardware failures can lead to a lab rebuild), I’ve been expanding the use of Ansible for configuration automation. In this post, I’m going to share the process I’ve created for bootstrapping newly-built servers into Ansible.
I developed this Ansible bootstrapping process to work in conjunction with the fully automated Ubuntu installation method that I described in an earlier post. The idea is that I would be able to boot a new server (virtual or physical), choose a configuration from the PXE menu, and a few minutes later have a built Ubuntu system. Then, with a single command, I could “bootstrap” the server into an Ansible configuration automation system. This latter part—configuring systems to work with Ansible—is what I’ll be describing here.
First, a (very) brief overview of Ansible. Ansible is a configuration automation tool that leverages standard SSH connections to remote devices in order to perform its work. Ansible is agentless, so no software has to be pre-installed on the managed servers, but this means Ansible has to authenticate against remote systems in order to establish these SSH connections. This authentication should, in ideal Continue reading
Docker and the Three Ways of DevOps
written by John Willis, Evangelist at Docker Have you read Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project? Some of the principles behind the Phoenix Project and an upcoming book I am co-authoring with Gene (The DevOps Cookbook) have been referred to as … ContinuedFeatured Article: Who’s Steering Your SDN Network? Regain Control
What’s required for operators to regain full control of their networks
Reflections on OpenStack Summit 2015 – A Market Maturing
I just came back from the OpenStack Summit 2015 in Vancouver and have finally caught my breath, so I can share some insights from this important event. It was incredible to bear witness to the continued growth of the OpenStack community in general and this event in particular. I still remember the very early summits when this industry was in its infancy. Back then, it seemed that most of the attendees were engineers conducting design sessions. This past week was gratifying to see how many real customers and actual OpenStack users were at the show. I would even go so far as to say they constituted the majority of the attendees.
Cumulus Networks co-founder and CTO Nolan Leake talks with visitors at the Cumulus Networks booth.
OpenStack Users Love Cumulus Networks
Cumulus Networks was very much present throughout the show — in our booth, in our partners’ booths, in panel sessions and, apparently, in the minds of many of the attendees. Cumulus Linux was seen as a universal network OS underlay for a variety of architectures. In addition to the sessions featuring our co-founder and CTO Nolan Leake, it was exciting to hear Cumulus Networks mentioned in many of the sessions I Continue reading
Just. Write.
Somewhere, someone is thinking about writing. They are confused where to start. Maybe they think they can’t write well at all? Perhaps they even think they’ll run out of things to say? Guess what?
Just. Write.
Why A Blog?
Social media has taken over as the primary form of communication for a great majority of the population. Status updates, wall posts, and picture montages are the way we tell everyone what we’re up to. But this kind of communication is fast and ephemeral. Can you recall tweets you made seven months ago? Unless you can remember a keyword, Twitter and Google do a horrible job of searching for anything past a few days old.
Blogs represent something different. They are the long form record of what we know. They expand beyond a status or point-in-time posting. Blogs can exist for months or years past their original post date. They can be indexed and shared and amplifed. Blogs are how we leave our mark on the world.
I’ve been fielding questions recently from a lot of people about how to get started in blogging. I’m a firm believer that everyone has at least one good blog post in them. One story Continue reading
Waste Not a Moment (Time Management)
One of the legends surrounding people who get a lot done is they simply don’t sleep. It’s long been said that I have some number of clones who do part of my work, or perhaps that if you ask different clones the same question, you’ll get different answers. This has, of course, been verified scientifically… But the truth is busy people do sleep, and they don’t have clones.
What they don’t do is waste the one resource everyone has a limited supply of — time. In the British Navy of yore, there was a phrase for this focus on using time effectively:
Waste not a moment.
Now I’m not here to give you time management tips and tricks. I’m happy enough to tell you what I do that seems to work. For instance —
- Set aside specific times to check email; don’t check it constantly.
- Schedule time to read and learn every day; still, however, slip in reading while you’re waiting in line, waiting on dinner by yourself, etc.
- Don’t spend a lot of time on social media. Don’t read the comments to a story, just the story.
- Don’t feel guilty about deleting things, or not reading them.
- Corollary one: Continue reading
Why Financial Services is Racing Ahead on OpenStack
AmEx, Wells Fargo, and others are moving quickly toward OpenStack deployments.