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!
[slideshare id=54195743&doc=devopskaizen-does15-damonedwards-final-151021011812-lva1-app6892] 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!
The First Date with Silicon Valley.
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…
On change and jellyfish.
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.…
How I get inspired by my kid.
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…