Category: configuration management

  • The Phoenix Project

    I recently stumbled upon a novel that talks about managing IT Operations. “The Phoenix Project”, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Wow, what a great read. This book accurately describes many of my experiences in IT with many different companies. This book has some exceptional concepts around optimizing interaction between Development, IT Operations, […]

  • Puppet deprecation in stdlib module…

    As part of the long upgrade to become fully compatible with puppet 4 and drop puppet 3 support — version 4.13+ of the stdlib module introduced some breaking changes for other modules that I use. I recently upgrade some individual modules using the ‘puppet module upgrade’ method. Upon upgrading, I received the following message: Error: […]

  • docker run docs confusing – which port?

    I was reviewing the docker docs today in an attempt to get things working on OSX and ran into a conflict when starting a new container running nginx. The docs say to run the following command: > docker run -d -p 80:80 –name webserver nginx That seems pretty straight forward, so I ran the command: […]

  • Throttling Requests with the Ruby aws-sdk

    A common problem of late is throttling requests when using the ruby aws-sdk gem to access AWS services. Handling these exceptions is fairly trivial with a while loop like the following: retry_count = 0 retry_success = 0 while retry_success == 0 retry_success = 1 begin # # enter code to interact with AWS here # […]

  • Latest Amazon EC2 AMI Supports Puppet 3.7.4

    Good news! After quite some time without a supported puppet and ruby combination from the EC2 yum repositories, the latest AMI has support for puppet 3.7.4. This will make deploying puppet environments easier and not require use of the gem and the development packages requirement to compile it.

  • puppet search function deprecation

    With the release of puppet 3.7, the search function is now deprecated, and will be removed in 4.0. This is a feature that I had used by recommendation of a puppet cookbook when creating virtual resources and managing users that I have now removed. Using the search function basically added the namespace of an existing […]