I’ve been consulting for some of the world’s largest companies for the last three years and have observed three themes that worry me: Agile is a really controversial word, despite the manifesto being quite clear on the matter, Somewhere within every company, there are many, many engineers that have been waiting weeks for test environments, and Engineers have the heaviest, plasticky-iest, and most unpleasant machines in the entire organization This (hopefully) brief post is about that third point. … »

First, huge shout out to the five of you that actually read stuff from my WordPress blog! You might have noticed that, with the exception of a a few posts for my company, I’ve been mostly silent. I haven’t given up on writing; quite the contrary, in fact! I haven’t run out of neurons to fire either (darn!). I’ve stopped writing on my own site for one reason: I pledged to not write again until I was completely out of WordPress. … »

Intro I was in high school when I got introduced to this weird app called VMware Workstation. I thought the idea of using your Windows machine to run other machines was really compelling - a perfect fit of my younger and geekier self. You couldn’t pay me enough back then to believe that almost all[^1] of the world’s most important applications would eventually run on virtual machines…on someone else’s computers! I really liked the idea, but Workstation was a bit of a bear to use at the time and the virtual machines it created were quite slow. … »

The Problem

You want to use Ansible’s docker_container module to do stuff, but want to also perform actions based on their output without specifying a logging driver or writing to a temp file.

The Solution

Do this:

One of the more interesting types of work we do at Contino is help our clients make sense of the differences between AWS and Microsoft Azure. While the HashiCorp toolchain (Packer, Terraform, Vault, Vagrant, Consul and Nomad) have made provisioning infrastructure a breeze compared to writing hundreds of lines of Python, they almost make achieving a multi-cloud infrastructure deployment seem too easy.

This post will outline some of the differences I’ve observed with using these tools against both cloud platforms. As well, since I used the word “multi-cloud” in my first paragraph, I’ll briefly discuss some general talking points on “things to consider” before embarking on a multi-cloud journey at the end.

I wrote a small Vagrantfile and helper library for provisioning VMware VMs from boxes hosted on Artifactory. I put this together with the intent of helping us easily provision our Rancher/Cattle/Docker-based platform wholesale on our machines to test changes before pushing them up.

Here it is: https://github.com/carlosonunez/vagrant_vmware_artifactory_example

Tests are to be added soon! I’m thinking Cucumber integration tests with unit tests on the helper methods and Vagrantfile correctness.

I’ve observed a sharp uptick of developers and systems administrators interested in “getting into DevOps” within the last year or so. This pattern makes sense, too: in an age where a single developer can spin up a globally-distributed infrastructure for an application with a few dollars and a few API calls, the gap between development and systems administration is closer than ever. While I’ve seen plenty of blog posts and articles about cool DevOps tools and thoughts to think about, I’ve seen fewer content on pointers and suggestions for people looking to get into this work.

My goal with this article is to, hopefully, draw what that path looks like. My thoughts are based upon several interviews, chats, late-night discussions on reddit.com/r/devops and random conversation, likely over beer and delicious food. I’m also interested in hearing feedback from those that have made the jump; if you have, please email me. I’d love to hear your thoughts and stories.

Getting docker running on Ubuntu on Windows is pretty simple. After installing the Docker Windows engine and restarting, run this in a bash session to bind the two together:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://0.0.0.0:2375

Pop this into your .bashrc and never think about it again.

Seinfeld wasn’t always the heavily-syndicated network cash cow it is today. The hit show started as an experiment for Jerry and Larry David. They wanted to write a show to describe the life of a comedian in New York, namely, Jerry’s. Despite Jerry’s limited acting and writing experience, they wrote their pilot in the late 1980’s and sold it as “The Jerry Chronicles,” which NBC made its first national appearance of on July 1989.

I’ll spare you the details, but eventually the crew found their beat and, shortly afterwards, historic levels of success. but I will say this: every episode of Seinfeld was based off of, and written by, a personal story from someone on its writing staff. Compared to the sitcom-by-committee shows that prevailed during the time, this was a small, but drastic, change that eventually made its way into the mainstream. (For example, every cast member on The Office, a favorite of mine, wrote their own episode; some more than once.)

The Problem

Ansible is a great configuration management platform with a very, very extensible language for expressing yoru infrastructure as code. It works really well for common workflows (deploying files, adding authorized_keys, creating new EC2 instances, etc), but its limitations become readily apparent as you begin embarking in more custom and complex plays.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say you have a playbook that uses a variable (or var in Ansible-speak) that contains a list of tables, like this:

TL;DR:

Control + ⌘ + Shift + G Home button triple-click.

Why?

Exposing ourselves to bright screens at night while checking our Facebook feed or reddit posts might not be as harmless as it seems. Tons of research, like this and this suggest that viewing things on bright screens right before bed makes our brains think that we’re in daylight longer than we actually are and, consequently, prevent us from falling asleep sooner than we should be. This combined with our early-start culture has been shown to lead to fatigue, decreased concentration and, in some folks, depression.

Additionally, other research has shown that prolonged exposure to artificial light (like those in most offices or our phones) can, over time, damage our eyes’ ability to adjust to incoming light and weaken their sensitivity to it.

I didn’t notice any of this until a Slashdot post introduced me to Flux several years ago. Before using this application, I was usually tired and sore (I rode my bike much more often back then) most of the time, but didn’t think much of it. I went out often back then, and most of the people I came across were just as or more tired than I was, so I thought I was fine.

I was quite surprised to discover that thousands of people were members of the “Imposter Syndrome” Google+ group within my first month at Google.

I always thought that getting into Google was probably the best social proof of “making it” that an engineer could receive. The interview process is hard, gruelingly technical, relatively unforgiving and riddled with rollercoasters; many incredibly talented Googlers had to go through the process two or more times before getting in for good. (I went through it twice…sort of.) The engineering talent at Google is nearly limitless; many of the world’s most formidable and accomplished computer scientists, sysadmins and software engineers work or worked at Google doing all sorts of things.

So imagine my surprise when literally tons of engineers join a group expressing how they feel as if they aren’t good enough to be at Google or working alongside people with Wikipedia articles written after them. Perhaps it was a big joke that completely went with my head, but given the many, many internal jokes made about not being good enough to be a Googler that I came across (mostly thanks to Memegen), I had my doubts.

• Edit 2: I’ve made a few small changes to the way I’ve described Docker architecture. Thanks, /u/jmtd!

• Edit: I mentioned below that Docker containers can only run a single process. While that is true by default, it is actually not the rule. You can use Docker Supervisor to manage multiple processes within a container. Here is how you do that. Thanks, /u/carlivar!

Fact: There are at least 22 conversations arguing about the usefulness/uselessness of containers happening right now. For every person arguing about them, at least three blog articles will shortly appear telling you why containers are going to be bigger than the Super Bowl or how they are the worst thing to happen to computing since web scale became a thing.

This short post will not be any of those.

I believe in using the right tool for the job and I hate fads. I’ve also been learning about containers for the last few months and am becoming incredibly interested in figuring out how to bring them to Windows 2012 and below (Windows Server 2016+ will have them, but Microsoft will be lucky and probably scared if they saw anything above 20-30% uptake within its first two years), so here’s a short post describing what I’ve learned about them, how they work, and why they might or might not be useful for you and/or your business.

I was discussing the power of Goroutines a few days ago with a fellow co-worker. Naturally, the topic of “doing things at the same time in fancy ways” came up. In code, this is usually expressed by the async or await keywords depending on your language of choice. I told him that I really liked how Goroutines abstracts much of the grunt work in sharing state across multiple threads. As nicely as he possibly could, he responded with:

You know nothing! Goroutines don’t fork threads!

This sounded ludicrous to me. I (mistakenly) thought that concurrency == parallelism because doing things “concurrently” usually means doing them at the same time simultaneously, i.e. what is typically described as being run in parallel. Nobody ever says “I made a grilled cheese sandwich in parallel to waiting for x.” So I argued how concurrency is all about multithreading while he argued that concurrency is all about context switching. This small, but friendly, argument invited a few co-workers surrounding us, and much ado about event pumps were made.

I love writing code and building awesome stuff, but there are times where fighting the urge to Reddit for 14 hours feels like this:

When this happens, I break out my secret weapon: *The Pomodoro Technique. *The basic premise behind this technique is alternating your time between spending several minutes on nothing but working towards a certain goal (let’s call it the hot period) or deliverable and a few minutes on anything that isn’t work (*the cold period). *