Ops All The Things!

016 - There Is No Magic

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this episode we spend some time discussing the idea that there is no magic bullet. At some level, you do need to understand how things work and why they work.

— cwebber

015 - DNS (or what was that IP again)

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In this episode Steven and I chat about the fun that is DNS. Everything is a DNS problem including this episode.

— cwebber

014 - Rants and Raves

Thu, 30 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

You may notice a bit of a gap in episode numbering… There is a show 013 out there, it was rather unlucky though so we are holding it back and may release it at some future point in time.

Since Chris and I haven’t talked much recently, we spent this show catching up on some industry changes.

We talk about:

Nano Server
Docker
Chef Style DevOps (video)
If you weren’t able to attend ChefConf, all the videos are up. And the PowerShell Summit NA was recently held and those videos are online as well.

— Steve

012 - Catching Up

Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Steve and I caught up to chat about the state of the world and what we have been up to. Now that the holidays are over, we should be able to get a little more consistent again.

— cwebber

011 - All About Attitude

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this episode Steve and I discuss a bit about our recent conference experiences and then dig into the idea that Attitude is Everything. Hope you enjoy!

— cwebber

010 - Development and the SysAdmin

Fri, 29 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Chris and I talk about the changing role of operations and systems administration.

Both Chris and I share the view that systems administration is evolving and that rounding out your systems knowledge with software engineering practices and skills will make you more valuable and enhance your career potential.

— Steve

Notes:

PowerShell Summit EU is at the end of September in Amsterdam. Join Steve there!
Chef Community Summits are coming up. Join Steve and Chris in Seattle. Join Steve in London.
Wave 6 of the DSC Resource Kit from the PowerShell Team is out.
PuppetConf is coming up. Join Chris there.

009 - Debug All The Things

Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Chris and I get together to talk about one of my all time favorite topics – debugging!

Enjoy the podcast, set breakpoints where you need them, and if you have a question include the stack trace from where the question arose. :)

— Steve

Notes:

008 - HA and DR

Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Dear listener,

Chris and I got back together to talk about the basic concepts around High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR). (And, no, High Availability is not being on-call in Colorado!) We cover some of the terminology used in the space, as well as some basic concepts and misconceptions.

This show was produced through the generosity of Chef.

— Steve

Notes:

Joyent Outage
Code Spaces is Out Of Business
Chef Community Supermarket Launch
DSC Resource Kit Wave 4 is Live
The Web Operations Book (that Chris threatened to hit me with…)

007 - Catching Up

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Hey All,

This was an awesome chance for Steve and I just to provide an update to where things stood. It is also the first episode where Chef started sponsoring. Looking forward to some time to do more of these.

— cwebber

Notes:

006 - Time Management

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There is a certain irony in the fact that it has taken us long to get this episode up. Sadly, the Ops part of both mine and Steve’s life got a bit more hectic than expected. So here it is, with special guest, Tom Limoncelli, the author of Time Management for Systems Administrators and a co-author of The Practice of System and Network Administration. It was great having Tom on the show and I hope we can have more episodes like this in the future.

— cwebber

005 - Revision Control

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Take a listen to the first version of our thoughts on revision control.

Overview

In this episode, we discuss revision control. Revision control is a topic that is near and dear to both Chris and I and we’ve got some strong opinions on how it should be used.

(SPOILER ALERT: For lots of things!)

We cover what revision control is, why it matters, and what should be revision controlled. We also talk a bit about how to deal with secrets or sensitive data that may need to pass through revision control.

We go on a bit of a tangent on why tooling that generates artifacts that can be revision controlled are preferable to tooling that is just “magic”. That discussion is thanks to Chris digging up this article on declarative configuration management versus VM templates.

News and Tools

Redhat and Centos join forces.
Steve uses Pester for PowerShell testing.
Chris uses jq to parse and play with JSON.
The So Cal Linux Expo is coming up. (REALLY SOON NOW, since Steve took a month to get this edited together).

Stay tuned for our next show on Time Management, with our first guest!

004 - The Holidays

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the holidays are over, here are some thoughts Chris and I have on them.

Overview

In this episode, we talk about the holidays, specifically how they impact operations personnel. We cover on-call considerations, bonding with family and co-workers over alcohol holiday parties, and code freezes.

News Items

Check out SysAdvent (and thanks to Chris for his hard work organizing it this year!)
Thanks to Brandon Burton (@solarce) for the gift of HangOps this year!
The Winter Scripting Games are upon us! Get your team together and join in!

Hope you all had a great holiday season and have had a great start to 2014!

003 - Documentation

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

In this episode we talk about documentation. Really taking a big picture view of how to document things and what should be documented. Along with that we try to talk a bit about the types of documentation that are not necessarily obvious, like monitoring.

During the show, Steve mentioned the Stack Exchange data center move. If you are interested, here are some pictures and commentary: http://www.reddit.com/r/cableporn/comments/1bcxfi/a_few_photos_from_the_stack_overflow_data_center/

News Items

Etsy’s Morgue tool for creating post-mortems: https://github.com/etsy/morgue
Windows Management Framework 4 (including Desired State Configuration) is available for Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2013/10/25/windows-management-framework-4-0-is-now-available.aspx
There are a few Calls for Proposals/Papers (though since Steve was late posting the show, Cascadia’s ends today – 12/9): Cascadia IT Conference and the Southern California Linux Expo
Great little story on how queuing of work can slow things down: http://kief.com/change-management-fail.html

Hope you enjoy the show.

002 - Ops is Value Add

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

This episode is really focuses on how Ops adds value and discusses lots of aspects around the roles of traditional IT and WebOps.

News Items

Launch of puppetbestpractices.com: http://www.puppetbestpractices.com
Launch of OpServer – Stack Exchange’s status dashboard: https://github.com/opserver/Opserver
DevOps in your job title is doing you harm: http://blog.petecheslock.com/2013/05/03/devops-in-your-job-title-is-doing-you-harm/
I’m Not a DevOps…Are You an Agile?: http://tech.mangot.com/blog/2013/05/29/-im-not-a-devops-dot-dot-dot-are-you-an-agile/

001 - The Beginning

Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Overview

This episode provides an introduction into the goals of the podcast and a little bit of info about Chris and Steve.

News Items

We skipped the news section this episode but will pick it up in the future.

Topics Discussed

About Us
Vision for the podcast
What is Ops?