“What features merged since the last release?” – “Did we introduce something which might break a deployment?” – “Let me grep through the commit history to check what happened.” Remember sentences like these when you’re about to release? If you like this fire-fighting mode, ignore this post. If you want to have a more relaxed release, this post will show you how to use a tool called reno to manage your release notes.
Did you ever wonder why you’re (again) in a meeting without a clear result? Do you feel like the topics got already discussed in a previous meeting? How often did your hear the sentence “Someone should work on that.”? Let’s be honest, our work family is sometimes a little dysfunctional. Join me in my personal reflection of the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable from 2002 by Patrick Lencioni, which helps to understand what’s happening.
In a previous post (Monitoring with Prometheus), we created one playbook which contained all the logic. This post will show how to do a refactoring of a playbook into smaller, reusable Ansible Roles. This allows us to hide complexity and to provide defined interfaces. It also increases the ability to work in parallel on different parts of your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) project. I won’t explore how you publish your roles to Ansible Galaxy but merely show a basic recipe how you move Playbook logic step by step into project specific roles.
This post is my recap of the Open Source Summit Europe conference which took place in Praque (Czech Republic) from October 23-26, 2017. I’ll go briefly through the sessions I attended and the notes I took.
One of the common causes for service degradation or interruption is still the failure or exhaustion of your basic infrastructure resources. This post gives you an intro how you can monitor your basic resources with Prometheus. It shows the setup with Ansible and the data visualization with Grafana. The post does not show all the capabilities of Prometheus. In fact, I’m showing you only the simplest configuration. The benefit of this post is, that it takes you from start to finish and gives you a playground you can easily recreate when things go wrong, thanks to Vagrant and VirtualBox. Beware, as this is a non-trivial (non-hello-world) example, this post is really long.
This is my take on the book The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win from 2014 by Gene Kim; Kevin Behr; George Spafford. It’s more of a personal reflection why I like the book – and why I think you should read it too – and less of a review.
Ever lost a host because one of the services on that host used all available disk space with its logs? logrotate is a common tool which truncates your logs to make sure this won’t happen anymore. This post is a short how-to.
If you have an OpenStack cloud with compute nodes with different CPU architectures, then this post will give you the needed information about how to tag your guest images, which enables the Nova scheduler to find a target with the correct CPU architecture.