The first time I heard about monitoring was at Yahoo! while one of my colleagues always talked about rolling out YMon to monitor a new cloud infrastructure, MobStor, that we had been building. YMon was a version of Nagios that was beefed up for the specific requirements at Yahoo! and…

In a real-life DevOps environment the need to have a local mail server is common. Typically to send out notifications from applications. Postfix is an excellent MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) that supports SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), a service that runs on port 25. Postfix can be configured to relay…

Though it may not be hard to find laborious attempts to define this largely new stream of work in the IT industry to be theoretically accurate, its understanding on the floor would depend on whom you ask. …

When DevOps was a buzzword In an article (DevOps Defined) that I published on my LinkedIn profile more than 5 years ago in which I tried to define “DevOps” by calling out the related operational areas, I mentioned that the real driving force of DevOps movement is the need to attain operational scalability. …

Introduction The acceptance of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as the default software delivery method and the widespread usage of public cloud and virtualization technologies by the enterprises kickstarted the DevOps movement — a big tent of ideas and best practices that address the operations management challenges resulted in by this huge shift in…

With almost all the precincts reporting in, 5 Democratic candidates divided all the state delegates between them — Pete Buttigieg (26%), Bernie Sanders (26%), Elizabeth Warren (18%), Joe Biden (16%) and Amy Klobuchar (12%) in the Iowa Democratic Caucus. I would order these candidates based on their policy and ideological…

The Agile methods to select and quantify a task such as backlog prioritization and estimating time for a story are not adequate to assess how the organization would benefit from that project overall. The break-even analysis proposed here would help to determine whether an automation project is worth doing by looking at the overall impact of rolling out that automation in the organization. Agile is limited by its narrow focus on the team that rolls out the automation — the DevOps team — and it cannot provide any metrics on the overall impact of an automated process on the organization.

Ansible has been a popular tool for verifying Linux-based infrastructure environment. Usage of the standup module makes it extremely easy as it demands very little knowledge of Ansible itself. An infrastructure environment, whether it is provisioned in a public cloud or private cloud or built using bare-metal machines in a data center, would need some amount of verification before deploying applications, however ephemeral the life of infrastructure would be. Typically, such verifications are needed during various stages of provisioning and configuring a cluster of machines, and, later when that cluster is available as the infrastructure for running software systems.

Having a 12-months rolling calendar would help to get a big picture of what we want to achieve on the long-term, get plenty of time to plan each event and gather limited resources esp the volunteer time to put up a good show whenever we roll out an event. In…