Service-Oriented Collaboration
This post is yet another take on how we should be creating software together. I’m now working on a book named “Coding Together” that will be reviewing all the challenges of collaborative software delivery and the ways of overcoming them for maximum creativity and efficiency. As I’m gathering materials – my understanding not only deepens but shifts – complex systems viewed holistically definitely cannot be analyzed as a sum of their parts. Two years ago I gave a few talks and wrote about the importance of enabling self-service principle in a smart and secure way for smooth and effective value delivery in software engineering organisations. I still hold a strong belief in self-service builds, tests, deployments and infrastructure provisioning. All these can greatly enhance the rate of innovation and the quality of produced software. If done correctly, that is… But it can be quite disastrous when this self-service concept implementation isn’t…
Cloud-aware, provider-agnostic monitoring
I’ve never had to deal so much with monitoring. I’ve established a few Nagios instances in earlier days, I’ve used Amazon CloudWatch, Pingdom and New Relic lately for cloud setups, but I don’t consider myself a monitoring expert. At Otomato we are currently mainly focused on software delivery processes, on how to get those bits from dev machines and into production in the most effective and agile manner without compromising quality. Monitoring, although an important part of running software and assuring successful value delivery (should I say an important part of DevOps?) , has been largely out of our scope. But now we are working on a new project where we had to deal with the full-full cycle – building, deploying and running. Moreover – the requirement was for cloud-provider-agnostic solutions as this is going to be a multicloud setup. And with that came the most exciting part of any project – the research!…
DevConTLV is only 2 days away!!!
If you’ve never been to DevConTLV – you are seriously missing out!!! Running under the banners of “Server Side Development and Rock’n’Roll” this is the grooviest software conference in Middle East, (or maybe even in the whole world?!) Great speakers, free beer and live music – what more can a geek ask for? The one taking place on the 22nd of March is probably the largest, the most bombastic DevConTLV ever. Featuring speakers from all parts of the planet, a Terraform training day and no other than Otomato’s own Ant Weiss as the DevOps track MC. There are only late bird ticket left now, they are a bit pricey, but you can use the ‘ANTWEISS‘ coupon to get a very nice discount. Hoping to see you all! P.S: and this is a sweet memory from the last year DevConTLV : Sputnik Hi-FI feat. Ant Weiss – Software is Eating the World!
Otomato – separating scopes.
If you’ve been reading the posts on this blog – you know that until now this was a mixed bag of professional articles, technical tips and personal impressions. Now that Otomato is going to become a full-blown consulting firm I feel it’s time to separate the personal from the professional. There still may be some shared context here and there, but starting today I’m moving my personal blogging to a Hugo-based site hosted on Github pages – http://antweiss.com
Going full time and looking for partners.
Dear friends, colleagues and clients! As some of you may know – I’ve decided to finally dedicate all of my working time to developing Otomato into the best in class DevOps and Software Delivery consultancy and training company. Starting March 10th this will be the focus of my business activity and I’m now open for projects, collaborations and partnerships. If you’re enthusiastic about DevOps and improving software delivery practices, if you need help with streamlining your workfows or enabling infrastructure automation – drop me a note and I’m sure we’ll find a way to do some great stuff together. Ant Weiss
User-friendly monitoring for your Jenkins server
We all love Jenkins. It’s flexible, scalable, has unbelievable community support (more than 1010 plugins available) and is very easy to get started with. No wonder Jenkins is the CI/CD server used in at least 70% of IT and R&D organisations around the globe. Once you start using Jenkins you quickly get hooked. It’s so easy to automate any development or system task, add a button and let your users push it whenever needed. And your Jenkins instance begins to grow. Very soon you have views, nested views, pipeline views, dozens of plugins for every little thing, jobs for dev, jobs for QA, jobs for project managers, an ever growing bunch of slave nodes, you name it.Everyone in the organisation is using Jenkins, everyone falls in love with it as much as you originally did. But then the day comes and your Jenkins that was so lively and fast when you installed it and ran…
Baby steps does it in DevOps!
Damon Edwards’ great talk on enabling continuous improvement.
Teaching DevOps
Today I’m starting to teach my part of the DevOps course we’ve built at Ness. I do Puppet, Ansible and Jenkins and I am also responsible for the final project. This is the second run we’re doing – the first one was a mild success, we had some road bumps, we’ve learned a few things and we’re inclined to make this one better – in true spirit of continuous improvement (which is one of the core values of DevOps in my book). This is the first attempt to create an all-in-one DevOps course on the Israeli market and naturally we are getting criticism as well as praise. I was contemplating this post for a long time but what really got me going is the heated discussion that occurred on Operations Israel FB page yesterday. Evgeny Zislis, the founder of DevOps Israel, and certainly one of the strongest professionals on Israeli market made some fun of spelling mistakes he found in…
my immutable infrastructure ignite – the references
DevOpsDays Tel-Aviv happened a couple of weeks ago. This was my first ever attempt at doing an ignite talk. Preparing and delivering it was both challenging and a lot of fun. The subject of the talk was Immutable Infrastructure and while there’s no point in posting the slides on their own (the main point in ignite is saying things and not showing slides) – there are a few links that I used when preparing for this talk and would now like to share with you. This is also important as there was no time for the references slide at the talk itself – so here are the references: Chad Fowler of course: http://chadfowler.com/blog/2013/06/23/immutable-deployments/ Florian Motlik of Codeship: https://blog.codeship.com/immutable-infrastructure/ Boxfuse blog: https://boxfuse.com/blog/no-ssh.html This O’reilly article by Josh Stella: http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/06/an-introduction-to-immutable-infrastructure.html And this interview with 6 experts from HighOps: https://highops.com/insights/immutable-infrastructure-6-questions-6-experts/
DevOps Days TLV
I’m excited to be giving an ignite talk at DevOps Days Tel-Aviv 2015. The talk will be my observations regarding pros and cons of immutable infrastructure – here’s the description: http://www.devopsdays.org/events/2015-telaviv/program/ignite_anton_weiss.html If you haven’t heard about the ignite format – here’s a short description: “These are 5 minute talks with 20 slides which auto-advance. If you aren’t familiar with the format, good examples can be found at http://igniteshow.com/” It’s one agile presentation 🙂 Hope to see you there!