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

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

Damon Edwards’ great talk on enabling continuous improvement.

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…

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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/

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!

I’m writing this on the plane on my way to San Francisco. Am I excited? Sure I am – this is my first visit to the US! It may seem pretty strange – I’ve been working in software for the last 15 years – most of the time on projects involving the American market. And still I never traveled for work. I even had a planned trip once, got a visa issued, but the project then fell through… On the other hand – this makes enough sense as I’ve spent most of my career working on infrastructure. And in this field (as in many others) there’s increasingly less need to be in a specifi place to do your work. As an example – I just spent 4 very productive hours in Frankfurt airport – sending mails, fixing bugs, talking to a customer and preparing a talk proposal for the upcoming…

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I’m on vacation with my family at the Curonian Spit in Lithuania. This is a breathtakingly beautiful place – a thin stripe of sand dunes and pine woods washed by the Baltic Sea on one side and the Curonian Bay on the other. There are bike routes running through the whole length of the spit, an endless sandy beach, and plenty of wild birds and animals. The food is cheap and the Lihuanians are friendly. We all had a lot of fun biking, walking and bathing in the cold waters of the Baltic. For me this is also a nostalgic experience – I’ve spent most of my childhood summers on the Baltic Sea. But it’s been more than 20 years since I last tasted its lightly-salted waters (compared to the intense saltiness of the Mediterranean). So the first plunge really brought back memories.The taste didn’t change. But other things did.…

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My kids are my source of inspiration. Children in general are bursting fountains of innovative ideas. Some of them make us laugh, yet others annoy the heck out of us, but most of them are exciting. Especially when it’s your own kid who comes up with an idea 🙂 But this time it wasn’t an innovative idea that got me inspired. It was the entrepreneurial spirit and execution of my elder son, Eran. The kid is hooked on a computer game. Which in itself is nothing special. Though the game is quite interesting. He and his friends play Minecraft. Now, I’m always very curious about what excites my children. And I’m the ops guy at home, helping everyone with their tech needs. So I started looking at the game, helping Eran with installing game mods and reading up on the game history and ecosystem. I loved the whole story of the game starting…

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