Managing a single cloud account is a challenge all by itself. Only adding more instances and services to one account can lead to challenges from keeping track of what is running to quota limits set by the providers. When you hit the logical limits of that account, expanding the footprint of your cloud strategy is more than just spinning up a new account and dropping the corporate credit card on it. Both Azure and AWS have created logical ways to organize your accounts along project, product, purpose, team, or billing boundaries. Figure out how to organize and plan for your expanding cloud environment and then learn the basics of using AWS or Azure structures and hierarchy to manage the growth of your cloud ecosystem. Enjoy this introduction of AWS Organizations, Control Tower, and Policies along with an overview of Azure Management, Subscriptions, and Resource Groups to effectively manage your workload.
Author: tomcudd Page 1 of 5
As in the last post Demystifying Infrastructure as Code, it should be clear how important it is for organizations moving their DevOps initiatives forward to learn and use IaC. The same importance should be applied to Configuration Management as well to prevent environmental drift, enable rapid deployments, provide scalable solutions, and maintain system integrity. Using source control, continuous integration, testing, and other software development practices will allow for sustainable automation at the operational level.
It’s an important piece of a successful and high performing DevOps organization to treat configuration management and infrastructure as code. Why? Because if someone working within a cloud provider can apply the same rigor of quality to systems that development teams do to application code, it will prevent environmental drift, enable more rapid deployments, provide solutions that scale, and ensure maintainable system integrity. Using source control, continuous integration, testing, and other software development practices will allow for sustainable automation at the operational level. Infrastructure as Code is especially powerful in that it can create an underlying base of stability that operational-focused teams demand, while also providing the support to move quickly in a way that business and application developers often require.
Also see part 2 here: Demystifying Configuration Management.
As the technology industry continues to learn more about how DevOps can improve workplace culture, improve delivery capability, and generally benefit entire organizations, the gaps that can happen when transitioning to a DevOps mindset are still there. It is possible to make these issues visible and overcome them. When you start to hear things like the below statements, it’s time to do something more:
- “Let’s Rebrand the Ops Team!”
- “DevOps is going to save us money!”
- “We need our whole organization to do DevOps!”
- “DevOps and ITIL are incompatible!”
- “DevOps sells itself!”
- “We don’t need to involve team X!”
- “Everything is going to get better right away!”
Pair Programming is one of the practices that fall under the Extreme Programming discipline. Benefits to practicing this behavior include improved knowledge sharing, consistent productivity, and fewer bugs. Any technologist looking to pair program should think through the situation driving this decision in order to make best use of the time and experience of the participants of a session.
I can never seem to find my recipes when I am looking for them, so I’m gonna post this one and others here on my blog. Please ignore any BBQ blasphemy, I just like to cook what my family likes to eat (sweet BBQ, on sale Ribs) with what I have available to me (a propane grill). Since this isn’t a food blog or a recipe site, there’s no story: dry rub (night before) + grill instructions (5-6 hours) + plus sauce instructions (half-hour).
Most of the things I learn on Linux, I’ve learned to play around with as virtual machines on my Windows Desktop. I’m putting this here for me to remember my steps in the future, but in case anyone else finds this helpful, yay, internet!
First of all, I’m a fan of VMware Workstation Player. Their website says: “The free version is available for non-commercial, personal and home use.” When you do pay for it (once you start making money or are working somewhere that you need it), it’s only $149.99 (as of 8/22/2019 when I checked)
https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player/workstation-player-evaluation.html
DevOps practitioners must get feedback from quality assurance and security testing as early in the development pipeline as possible. When continuously building and deploying web application projects, being able to run a test and get output on it within minutes is a super power skill that gets teams ahead of potential problems. In this workshop, be prepared to use Docker to run multiple tests on your websites, learn about what the different tests are used for, and then become familiar with the output to interpret them for actionable feedback. We will analyze the following testing capabilities.
- Performance
- Security
- SEO
- Accessibility
Organizations that have built a positive DevOps culture have transformed as part of a continuous and ongoing journey. The members of the organization should have a noticeable difference in how they behave presently versus how they behaved in the past. If the ultimate goal is to change the way the entire organization functions and operates, that means two things: changing the way everyone in the organization thinks about how they work and changing the way people behave.
I have had the opportunity to present this topic any many conferences this year and feel it is a critical topic for teams trying to make progress in their DevOps journey. Please feel free to continue the discussion with me on twitter @tomcudd.