In the last few weeks I have been immersed in Ansible. I have been using Ansible with Vagrant, with Docker and in a test environment on bare metal. Those are all topics I may explore in more depth later but what really is conspicuous today is the way I can build simple utilities with Ansible. My collection of Ansible scripts which aren’t part of a larger set of playbooks is still quite small but I feel it is but the tip of the iceberg. Read on →

In the last couple of weeks I have been converting Monasca from Chef to Ansible. This has begun with the monasca-vagrant development environment. Having worked with Chef for the last 3 years as I learn Ansible I inevitably evaluate it in comparision to Chef. The core quality of Ansible compared to Chef is Simplicity. Ansible attempts to solve many of the same problems as Chef but with an approach that seems born of real world experience and eliminates many theoretically superior design paradigms for practical alternatives. Read on →

Recently in my normal reading I ran across this blog post by Nathan Marz expounding the merits of a blog. Not long after reading this and letting it percolate through my mental background process I begun a class on Coursera, titled Learning How to Learn. In this midst of this class I realized that the benefits of blogging Nathan promotes are essentially ways to enhance your day to day learning. Read on →