How to break into Devops

Cloud academy are offering a course for Free that might help.

Ask me how I moved into DevOps.

https://cloudacademy.com/cloud-computing/introduction-to-devops-course/

Gotchas with Bash programming

Working with Linux servers and automating tasks requires the use of bash programming. This is quite an old language if you compare it to 'modern' languages such as ruby.

As such it has some very unfriendly ways. One of which bit me today.
One of the scripts purges old snapshot on AWS.

Bash tries to be helpful by file globbing and word splitting. This caused some undesired effects.

Fortunately, thanks to Greg's Wiki the fix is quite easy. use quotes.

snap_data=$(/home/ec2/bin/ec2-describe-snapshots $snapshot_id_evaluated --region $AWS_REGION)

snap_description=$(echo "$snap_data" | grep complete | awk '{print $9}')

snap_creation_date=$(echo "$snap_data" | grep complete | awk '{print $5}')

purge_after_fe=$(echo "$snap_data" | grep ^TAG.*PurgeAfterFE | cut -f 5)

Thanks

Are lawyers deprecated?

We all know our identity is important. However sometimes, when your label (name) is the same or similar to someone else it can cause problems. I see and hear this problem daily as a project I recently worked on had three Neils in the team. Of course we have surnames too. That is the differentiating factor.
Imagine the shock to the world when lawyers get involved in protecting a name. All sorts of fun can ensue and my opinion is that unless it could easily be confused then there is no issue.
I refer to the NPM shock that devastated a number of websites and applications this week.

Read all about the JavaScript NPM module here. https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve-just-liberated-my-modules-9045c06be67c

aws ec2 tools version

I've been coding a puppet module to install/update the aws EC2 tools on centos.

These are already installed on Amazon Linux servers, and as it happens, on the core AMI used by the business.

The trouble I had was determining the version of the tools that was installed if any. This led to some frustration as the newer features such as
ec2-copy-snapshot --encrypted

are not present in the previous versions of the tools.

well I was very pleased with myself when i found a command to run that told me the version.

ec2-cmd ShowVersion

Certainly not following the standard of --version or similar, but there is it.

The version (as of Feb 2016) is 1.7.5.1 and latest is available here.

EC2 Command Line Tools

scaling up or scaling out - aws choices

Amazon Web Services offers a range of tiny (t2.nano) to massive (m3.2xlarge) servers for any power your application may require. Upgrading your server along this scale is usually called Scaling up. Where as creating or adding servers to a cluster for your application to sit on could be referred to as Scaling out.

What are the differences between scaling up and scaling out

Scaling up or vertical scaling

This is where you upgrade the cpu or add processors and memory in your server. The general idea being, more power equals better.

• Pros
  • Less licensing cost
  • Easier to configure
  • Quicker upgrades on virtual hardware with less downtime
  
  
• Cons
  • Price
  • Bigger risk to failures, all eggs in one basket
  • Limit to how big you can grow
  
  

Scaling out or horizontal scaling

Having a cluster of servers working together means you can add (or remove) servers as the need changes.

• Pros
  • Flexible
  • Redundancy and more resiliency to failures
  • Easy to upgrade and add extra or remove surplus capacity
  
  
• Cons
  • More licence fees (per server models)
  • More complicated to manage
  • Data consistency may need consideration
  
  

Embracing cloud services and the phoenix approach can offer further savings to your business by scaling dynamically throughout the week or even day based on the demands on your servers.

Either way can work for your application as it grows. You are best placed to see what works best, depending on the stage your application is in, but we aware of the inherent limitations that scaling up has and will bite you sooner or later.