Learning AlpineLinux.org, Ansible.com, and Packer.io

26/Jan 2021 23 min. read

For my 2020-1 holiday break, I decided my next personal project would be to rebuild my home infrastructure on containers. I’d been inspired by a recent discovery of LinuxServer.io, where open source projects are built and run as containers. While I have a burning desire to better my Kubernetes practice, not enough of the world delivers software as a Helm chart, so merely running everything as containers would be a good intermediate step. Let me share my first six steps with examples…

Tags// linux, alpine, ansible, packer, artifact, infrastructure-as-code, developer, operating-system, pets, configuration-management, cloud-init, bootstrap,
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US Sedition, Presidential Censure, and Impeachment

10/Jan 2021 4 min. read

Democracy is a process: this past Wednesday was another test of United States democracy and a reckoning of our current administration’s dangerous tactics to stay in power. This has been another disheartening, depressing, embarrassing week in our enduring COVID-19 imposed lock down, but an older threat, the disease of poor thinking, was evident.

Tags// america, politics, personal,
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Why You Want Google Authenticator, but Don't Need It

14/Dec 2020 8 min. read

Two factor authentication is an important safeguard for all of your accounts and it has proven itself by protecting one of the largest software engineering organizations in the world from breach. In order to easily control your safety and privacy without resorting to cloud service providers, let’s explore how to adopt dynamic passwords and avoid outsourcing your credentials!

Tags// TOTP, 2FA, password, security,
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The American Soul: A Way Forward on Juneteenth

7/Jun 2020 8 min. read

A State of Emergency In the past three months, the soul of America has been laid bare in increasing amounts as we address our society’s response to our impaired health, economic, and political processes. There is a single crisis in all of this: our attitude as citizens to come together and solve any problem. America has been divided and exploited by those who profit by perpetuating the current system of inequalities of our society.
Tags// america, blacklivesmatter, education, politics, culture, advocate, personal,
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COVID-19 Resources

26/Mar 2020 1 min. read

Some helpful resources for learning and understanding our global pandemic, which I hope unites us in achieving a global, human perspective: we’re all in this together.

Tags// life,
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Version Control for Operators

25/Mar 2020 24 min. read

Version Control is an essential tool making your work reproducible and visible, which can unlock profound amplifying effects of your contributions. As operators grow into developers, they can build toward state of the art GitOps!

Tags// git, operators, GitOps, tutorial, version-control, BlackLivesMatter,
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What is a DevOps Advocate?

29/Sep 2019 15 min. read

What is an Advocate and what is it in context of Developer Relations (DevRel)? After more than twenty years, I have returned to the realm of DevRel: so what has changed and what has remained the same?

Tags// developer, advocate, DevRel, DevOps,
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DevOps in a Box

5/May 2018 4 min. read

My long time fantasy has been to demonstrate an entire CI/CD pipeline with continuous operations of applications to discuss behavior driven operations and testing as monitors.

The call for this happened over and over at DevOpsDays to answer: how does one learn DevOps, practice site reliability engineering, or have a full application lifecycle environment?

So let’s create a minimal viable product BTD scenario of my DevOps Automation system, extend it to prefix Governance and suffix Management, and then drive maturity to illustrate and discuss best practices.

Tags// bootstrap, DevOps, pattern,
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SSH Key Authentication Overview

22/Apr 2018 4 min. read

For those of you new to automation, it can be overwhelming on first exposure to handle every link in the chain to launch your first Nutanix Calm blueprint. Many Calm Marketplace blueprints leverage Linux, cloud-init, and SSH keypairs to enable security best-practices for composable infrastructure as code.

Tags// ssh, authentication, Windows, cloud-init, Linux, calm, security, tutorial,
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Calm.io: a blog series recap!

18/Feb 2018 7 min. read

From September 23, 2015 to May 26, 2016, I took hiatus from my personal blog to explore, explain, and write a number of DevOps articles for my employer on the Calm.io blog. Nutanix acquired Calm.io and I am still part of the Nutanix Calm team, but I’m re-posting these articles on my personal blog since the originals are no longer directly accessible. I am also enhancing them to clarify language, add learnings, and append significant developments as postscripts.

Tags// automation, DevOps, Calm,
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The DevOps Maturity Diagram

12/Apr 2017 12 min. read

The opening of my first Calm.io DevOps article started with:

Let me share what I’ve learned on my journey to DevOps: it is a culturally rendered term and it has a different meaning for everyone.

In that article, I go on to define DevOps and explain the term. Let me share my experience to easily chart the journey of progressive stages to DevOps maturity.

Tags// DevOps, maturity, diagram,
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Ten Steps from Pets to Cattle

25/Jan 2017 11 min. read

Why do we need DevOps when IT and Operations succeed in their responsibility for security and uptime, using administrative tools to maintain, backup, and restore those systems? Because the operations domain must be documented, democratized, and distributed to achieve agility before Operations returns to become a force multiplier instead of a keep the lights on organization. Let me demonstrate that traditional values for long lived infrastructure and their retroactive justification do not apply when progressing to a DevOps mindset.

Tags// DevOps, pets, cattle,
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Reconciling Configuration Management and Immutable Infrastructure

26/May 2016 8 min. read

Tags// automation, DevOps, immutable, configuration management, Calm,
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Configuration Management in the DevOps World

24/May 2016 10 min. read

Tags// automation, DevOps, Configuration Management, Calm,
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Declarative Operating Systems

12/Mar 2016 2 min. read

A new breed of operating systems adopt declarative configuration management for an interesting hybrid! OS maintenance of long-lived servers remains a challenge for our “mutable” infrastructure.

Tags// declarative, operating system, security,
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Demystifying Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment

28/Dec 2015 14 min. read

Tags// automation, DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Calm,
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Infrastructure as Code and Calm Blueprints

3/Nov 2015 10 min. read

Tags// automation, DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, Blueprint, Calm,
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Why is DevOps So Hard?

20/Oct 2015 6 min. read

Tags// automation, DevOps, culture, Calm,
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DevOps Demystified

13/Oct 2015 3 min. read

For a term that is not even six years old, DevOps remains a mysterious pursuit for many software engineering organizations. Let me define DevOps to help you understand and chart your own journey. Hint: it is a cultural term!

Tags// devops, definition, culture,
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I Dream of DevOps, but What is DevOps?

23/Sep 2015 6 min. read

Tags// DevOps, culture, Calm,
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Artifact Repositories

26/Aug 2015 4 min. read

The past: desktop builds uploaded to the FTP server; the present: global artifact delivery networks. Release management and artifact repositories are they way we deliver software and infrastructure today.

Tags// artifact, build, distribution,
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Database Change Management

17/Aug 2015 5 min. read

Database configuration management tools allow us version the database and treat it like code! We want DevOps, not mysterious, hidden, hand crafted DBA (pet) ops whenever possible. Another flashback to 1998.

Tags// database, diagram, code,
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HTML Slide Show Survey

23/Apr 2015 2 min. read

PowerPoint and other proprietary slide-ware, bah! We already have a universal, open system for communication called the web, so let’s explore web presentation applications.

Tags// HTML, slide, web,
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Building the LAMP stack with Phing

10/Apr 2015 5 min. read

A flashback to 2007 with a tangible artifact in my journey to infrastructure as code: building the LAMP stack with Phing.

Tags// LAMP, build, Phing, sgi, webmaster, web,
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Container Infrastructure Strategy

4/Apr 2015 10 min. read

In these early years of containers, “heavy containers” represent a typical approach which resembles virtual machines, includes the operating system user land, and desires configuration management. Does this starting point represent the opposite of container promise and the journey to immutable infrastructure?

Tags// container, immutable, infrastructure, configuration-management,
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DevOps BTD Pattern for Continuous Deployment

18/Mar 2015 4 min. read

What happens when you find the same macro and micro pattern in your automation diagram? You reinforce your goals to improve code flow and service design on the way to test driven development!

Tags// DevOps, build, test, deploy, pattern,
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Today's DevOps Automation Diagram

11/Mar 2015 4 min. read

#shipit and #failfast: I want to share and discuss the DevOps Automation Diagram for continuous deployment. Via open source and this blog, we can elevate the state of our software engineering and service design!

Tags// DevOps, automation, diagram,
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A DevOps Automation State Diagram

10/Mar 2015 3 min. read

Wonderful accomplishments kicked-off my Infrastructure as Code project: one should start with a map of the world before deciding where to focus, but it is even better when you can optimize and render a new map in real-time!

Tags// automation, diagram, DevOps,
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About Mark

6/Mar 2015 3 min. read

A DevOps professional with pioneering work on the world’s biggest Internet real-time event and web sites across the engineering, operations, content, and marketing disciplines. Mark’s focus is on people and software development along with system design and life cycle thinking: he can build, secure, scale, and manage teams, applications, and infrastructure to work together while planning and nurturing their continuous operations and improvement.

Tags// about, career, webmaster, DevOps,
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Time for a new development project!

6/Mar 2015 4 min. read

What does one do when laid off? You need to scratch that itch and address the things that are in the back of your head and occasionally keep you awake at night. Technical dreams and technical debt follow as I start my Infrastructure as Code blog.

Tags// about, CMS, infrastructure,
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1/Jan 0001 1 min. read

tags: [‘Maturity’] draft: true date: “2020-02-09T16:29:10-06:00” title: “Automated Maturity Assessment” Notes From JenkinsWorld 2019 SF, Salesforce talk What does good look like? Categorize criteria: building vs. deployment vs testing vs reporting 5 expertise levels: base, beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Experts: show org examples Team CI/CD adoption: At SFDC.com, of 90 scrum teams, over 7 domains, 30 have adopted in first six months: asked the Product Owner, Team Lead, etc.
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1/Jan 0001 2 min. read

tags: [‘career’, ‘DevOps’] draft: true date: “2020-02-09T16:29:10-06:00” title: “Career as a Feedback Loop” Career as a Feedback Loop: serial DevOps? Nomadic ramblings on the attention economy of cloud, web, Internet native I Couldn’t Get a Job with my Degree! After graduation with my B.S. Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, I began my search for work. It was during a recession. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, I sent out over a hundred resumes with customized cover letters.
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