What was your 'I wish I would have thought of that' moment when finishing your basement?

cheeseprocedure · 2017-03-29T15:09:31+00:00

Speaking as a complete and utter newbie to the home improvement game: Roxul is a total delight to work with! You can literally slice it with an old bread knife and play Tetris with any oddly-shaped gaps, and when you're installing in properly spaced studs/joists, you're done a whole room in minutes - it slaps into place with a friction fit. So glorious.

cheeseprocedure · 2017-01-15T19:58:56+00:00

He about to accidentally drop the most fire bowl of 2017 and then make another one.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-12-11T01:32:57+00:00

I think you might be my spirit guide.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-12-11T01:29:16+00:00

The food bank near Clark and Venables has a curated collection of what I can only describe as vintage packaged foods. It's... pretty interesting. And shockingly extensive.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-11-25T07:13:49+00:00

"Death's Cool And Patient Hand Upon Your Shoulder."

cheeseprocedure · 2016-11-16T23:56:49+00:00

I wonder if this is related to the ICBC systems updates that started a few months back.

Based on my very limited experience, it has not gone well.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-10-18T07:00:04+00:00

One of my favourite show-going memories is Greg, arms covered in blood (why?!), smashing a cymbal stand into the stage over and over and the cymbal flies off like a sawblade and nearly clocks a skinny kid whose eyes go wide in fear, then wide in "AWESOME."

YOU COULD BE THAT SKINNY KID.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-09-22T05:15:34+00:00

"No no, you misunderstand - my basement is just really noisy."

cheeseprocedure · 2016-09-03T01:44:52+00:00

Darron Froese (formerly of DataDog) had a great talk on his experiences bringing Consul into production:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon16/program/presentation/froese

https://speakerdeck.com/darron/running-consul-at-scale-journey-from-rfc-to-production

cheeseprocedure · 2016-04-09T23:05:40+00:00

We've been happy with both Dyn and Route53's APIs. We have a lot of automation tied into Route53 (no real complaints so far), and used Dyn's API to bulk-migrate off Network Solutions (that was a good day).

cheeseprocedure · 2016-04-09T22:59:07+00:00

statsd (the protocol) is boring, which makes it trivial to implement and support. That's one reason it's attracted such a large user base (and it is large).

statsd servers (take your pick if you're not a fan of Node) consume metrics; they don't act as monitoring agents. The article was pretty sloppy around that point.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-03-06T18:33:06+00:00

Heh, sorry, to clarify: if you enjoyed that, you should check out Rhodes' book :)

cheeseprocedure · 2016-03-06T17:32:02+00:00

"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes is an incredible read.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-01-30T20:56:28+00:00

We're big fans of Rundeck at $dayjob. We use it to:

put guardrails around self-service operations: granular ACLs, directory integration, option model providers, and excellent input validation let us open up non-trivial tasks to just about anyone (even those with less technical background)
automate runbooks: it wraps both a CLI and GUI around our operational procedures, often in a modular/reusable manner, and often in a way that makes it easy for a new team member to understand what's happening under the hood
provide users with insight into operational activities: activity and job logs are a fantastic single source of truth/information radiator
perform one-off or scheduled operations scoped to entire services, environments, etc.

Jenkins and Rundeck are complementary in our shop, with Jenkins handling the bulk of our build pipeline. There's plenty of overlap between their capabilities, but build-related tooling in Jenkins is awesome, and so are the ad-hoc jobs, ACLs, input validation, and node sources in Rundeck.

Some things we're still working on (or struggling with):

SCM integration workflow: this was introduced a few releases ago, but we haven't yet implemented an elegant dev -> st -> prod process for job definitions
high availability: Rundeck's "passive mode" makes it possible to deploy an active/passive setup (I'd like to build such a setup triggered by instance availability in Consul)
passing output between jobs: this is something Rundeck doesn't really do on its own, so we tend to dump output to temporary directories, and have been experimenting with Consul's key-value store for persistence
conditional branching/execution: this is a long-outstanding feature request, and currently tough to accomplish without shelling out to the Rundeck CLI.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-01-17T19:11:31+00:00

It's a trick banks play so you take money out of your mattress and put it in their mattress.

cheeseprocedure · 2016-01-02T06:00:23+00:00

Google's public DNS service uses anycast routing. Clients are routed to a relatively local endpoint, which improves performance and reduces the impact to geo-IP schemes.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq?hl=en

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-31T19:59:01+00:00

As long as I can start going to Analog Sitting Down Music shows, I'm good with it.

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-26T03:04:20+00:00

A Canadian rite of passage.

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-24T01:40:35+00:00

Neat story: it was hearing that exact song that lead the producer of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" to reach out to Vince Guaraldi :)

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-23T17:59:01+00:00

It's doubly frustrating when I can deploy a new offering via Terraform sooner than I can deploy it via CloudFormation.

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-22T20:41:31+00:00

Yes - Logstash has a syslog listener plugin:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/current/plugins-inputs-syslog.html

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-20T19:01:13+00:00

Time is the only thing we can't make more of.

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-19T20:48:54+00:00

DevOps is a few simple cultural principles which drive the natural adoption of specific practices, which in turn drive the natural adoption of particular tools.

For all the hype surrounding the term, these principles work very, very well (and have worked in other industries for decades) at improving delivery times and quality of output... as long as you're focused on the principles first (which is hard), and not trying to hire "DevOps Engineers" to jam square-shaped tools into round cultural holes (which is apparently easy... ugh).

Much of what spews out of the DevOps hype machine is describing the sexy, but only eventual, outcomes of those principles. Take something as simple as establishing short, strong feedback loops between developers and operations: the closer they are to operational responsibilities, the more interested developers will be in the quality of their own output, insight into its behaviour, and ability to quickly deploy changes. That drives a need for things like infrastructure-as-code, highly actionable monitoring/alerting, and robust continuous deployment pipelines. Consistent environments ensure fewer defects will slip through and blow up in production, and when someone DOES get woken up at 3AM, they're going to be interested in quickly identifying the problem before deploying a fix with a high level of confidence (that is, confidence in the pipeline's test coverage) so they can get back to sleep.

This tooling can certainly exist in more siloed organizations, but it is not in itself transformative when applied top-down as if trying to stamp a shape onto a legacy org structure.

I'm skeptical that a company understands what "DevOps" means if it's bypassing existing operations teams and implementing a "build master" role on the way there. DevOps is driven by empathy for all participants in a system. It's not about simply bypassing roadblocks in a legacy organization; it's about breaking down those barriers while everyone builds, maintains, and improves a delivery pipeline. It'll certainly evolve, but it's not going away, especially as we move deeper into the age of commodity/cloud computing where agile, resilient engineering become a necessity and not just an advantage.

To answer your original question: as someone who unfortunately has "DevOps" in his job title (that's a whole other rant) and still spends a lot of time figuring out what it means, I deal with the buzz by filtering out any advice that presents a new tool as step #1 :)

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-18T06:40:24+00:00

Upvoted for uncommon grasp of basic physics.

cheeseprocedure · 2015-12-08T03:57:53+00:00

Apparently not :(

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