Anyone in the industry who hasn’t yet read multiple blog posts on Docker is living under a rock. There is a lot of hype about Docker and its potential. I also revel in the long term vision for containers and their potential impact on the industry. However until I have an awesome infrastructure where I can deploy images into production my practical mindset drives me to cut through the hype and ask what use is Docker for my work today?

As I have explored Docker here are the uses for it that I have encountered that bring practical value to my day to day work.

Read on →

The Managers Goal - Enable Team Productivity

I am not management expert and it is beyond my expertise to layout the value of management for an organization. On the other hand I am engineer on a software engineering team and I do have some clear ideas on what I want from management and what I believe most of my peers also would like. It all boils down to this, an engineering manager should enable his team to get work done.

For most engineers a large part of their motivation is the desire to be productive. The more a manager enables this the better everything works. Not only does more work get done, engineers are more satisfied and they have a better perception of and relationship with their manager.

Read on →

Ansible is relatively simple in relation to other configuration management frameworks. This makes it easier to approach and accomplish real work with, especially for those who don’t work in it full time, however there are times when more functionality is needed. Ansible’s answer for most of these situations is to write a module.

I have written a couple of modules for Monasca and doing so was easy, particularly if you know Python.

Read on →

It would be an mistake to call me an Ansible expert but I am now an experienced Ansible user and it is time to expand on my earlier Ansible posts. I have now been using Ansible on a regular basis for awhile and have used it with vagrant based vms, docker containers, as well as across small clusters of machines. I have also written a couple of Ansible modules and will likely write another one or two soon. Read on →

A few years ago I was happy to see the movement away from the complicated and fragile system V style init scripts. This is something that both Upstart and systemd accomplish well. Additionally the ability to start up services in parallel with more advanced ordering is quite useful. Though in many ways I can work with either system I am glad that the Linux community is converging on just one option, I think this standardization is a large benefit for the community as a whole. Read on →