Ops All The Things!: Recent Episodes
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In this episode we spend some time discussing the idea that there is no magic bullet. At some level, you do need to understand how things work and why they work.
— cwebber
In this episode Steven and I chat about the fun that is DNS. Everything is a DNS problem including this episode.
— cwebber
You may notice a bit of a gap in episode numbering… There is a show 013 out there, it was rather unlucky though so we are holding it back and may release it at some future point in time.
Since Chris and I haven’t talked much recently, we spent this show catching up on some industry changes.
We talk about:
- Nano Server
- Docker
- Chef Style DevOps (video)
- If you weren’t able to attend ChefConf, all the videos are up. And the PowerShell Summit NA was recently held and those videos are online as well.
— Steve
Steve and I caught up to chat about the state of the world and what we have been up to. Now that the holidays are over, we should be able to get a little more consistent again.
— cwebber
In this episode Steve and I discuss a bit about our recent conference experiences and then dig into the idea that Attitude is Everything. Hope you enjoy!
— cwebber
In this episode, Chris and I talk about the changing role of operations and systems administration.
Both Chris and I share the view that systems administration is evolving and that rounding out your systems knowledge with software engineering practices and skills will make you more valuable and enhance your career potential.
— Steve
Notes: * PowerShell Summit EU is at the end of September in Amsterdam. Join Steve there! * Chef Community Summits are coming up. Join Steve and Chris in Seattle. Join Steve in London. * Wave 6 of the DSC Resource Kit from the PowerShell Team is out. * PuppetConf is coming up. Join Chris there.
Chris and I get together to talk about one of my all time favorite topics – debugging!
Enjoy the podcast, set breakpoints where you need them, and if you have a question include the stack trace from where the question arose. :)
— Steve
Notes:
- Supermarket is alive!
- Atom has a Windows build!
- Want Steve’s previous job? Because Steve’s a Community Manager at Chef now.
- About debugging
- Debug It!: Find, Repair, and Prevent Bugs in Your Code
- Brendan Gregg’s Books
- Sentry
- Our show on documentation
- PAL – Performance Analysis Of Logs Tool
- cURL Tool
- Sysinternals tools
Dear listener,
Chris and I got back together to talk about the basic concepts around High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). (And, no, High Availability is not being on-call in Colorado!) We cover some of the terminology used in the space, as well as some basic concepts and misconceptions.
This show was produced through the generosity of Chef.
— Steve
Notes: * Joyent Outage * Code Spaces is Out Of Business * Chef Community Supermarket Launch * DSC Resource Kit Wave 4 is Live * The Web Operations Book (that Chris threatened to hit me with…)
Hey All,
This was an awesome chance for Steve and I just to provide an update to where things stood. It is also the first episode where Chef started sponsoring. Looking forward to some time to do more of these.
— cwebber
Notes: * Incident Command System (ICS) * The Ship Show Episode 25: Keep Calm and PROD On * DSC Book * cwebber’s list of podcasts
There is a certain irony in the fact that it has taken us long to get this episode up. Sadly, the Ops part of both mine and Steve’s life got a bit more hectic than expected. So here it is, with special guest, Tom Limoncelli, the author of Time Management for Systems Administrators and a co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration. It was great having Tom on the show and I hope we can have more episodes like this in the future.
— cwebber
Take a listen to the first version of our thoughts on revision control.
Overview In this episode, we discuss revision control. Revision control is a topic that is near and dear to both Chris and I and we’ve got some strong opinions on how it should be used.
(SPOILER ALERT: For lots of things!)
We cover what revision control is, why it matters, and what should be revision controlled. We also talk a bit about how to deal with secrets or sensitive data that may need to pass through revision control.
We go on a bit of a tangent on why tooling that generates artifacts that can be revision controlled are preferable to tooling that is just “magic”. That discussion is thanks to Chris digging up this article on declarative configuration management versus VM templates.
News and Tools * Redhat and Centos join forces. * Steve uses Pester for PowerShell testing. * Chris uses jq to parse and play with JSON. * The So Cal Linux Expo is coming up. (REALLY SOON NOW, since Steve took a month to get this edited together).
Stay tuned for our next show on Time Management, with our first guest!
Now that the holidays are over, here are some thoughts Chris and I have on them.
Overview In this episode, we talk about the holidays, specifically how they impact operations personnel. We cover on-call considerations, bonding with family and co-workers over alcohol holiday parties, and code freezes.
News Items * Check out SysAdvent (and thanks to Chris for his hard work organizing it this year!) * Thanks to Brandon Burton (@solarce) for the gift of HangOps this year! * The Winter Scripting Games are upon us! Get your team together and join in!
Hope you all had a great holiday season and have had a great start to 2014!
Overview In this episode we talk about documentation. Really taking a big picture view of how to document things and what should be documented. Along with that we try to talk a bit about the types of documentation that are not necessarily obvious, like monitoring.
During the show, Steve mentioned the Stack Exchange data center move. If you are interested, here are some pictures and commentary: http://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/1bcxfi/a_few_photos_from_the_stack_overflow_data_center/
News Items * Etsy’s Morgue tool for creating post-mortems: https://github.com/etsy/morgue * Windows Management Framework 4 (including Desired State Configuration) is available for Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2013/10/25/windows-management-framework-4-0-is-now-available.aspx * There are a few Calls for Proposals/Papers (though since Steve was late posting the show, Cascadia’s ends today – 12/9): Cascadia IT Conference and the Southern California Linux Expo * Great little story on how queuing of work can slow things down: http://kief.com/change-management-fail.html
Hope you enjoy the show.
Overview This episode is really focuses on how Ops adds value and discusses lots of aspects around the roles of traditional IT and WebOps.
News Items * Launch of puppetbestpractices.com: http://www.puppetbestpractices.com * Launch of OpServer – Stack Exchange’s status dashboard: https://github.com/opserver/Opserver * DevOps in your job title is doing you harm: http://blog.petecheslock.com/2013/05/03/devops-in-your-job-title-is-doing-you-harm/ * I’m Not a DevOps…Are You an Agile?: http://tech.mangot.com/blog/2013/05/29/-im-not-a-devops-dot-dot-dot-are-you-an-agile/
Overview This episode provides an introduction into the goals of the podcast and a little bit of info about Chris and Steve.
News Items We skipped the news section this episode but will pick it up in the future.
Topics Discussed * About Us * Vision for the podcast * What is Ops?