Publications de Sebastian Caceres

Agile

On Operations, DevOps and soft skills

Let’s talk about communication for a bit. One of the most interesting roles I’ve had to fulfil the last couple of years has been the “Operations guy working as a part of a Development team”. This is a fascinating situation to find yourself in. Allow me to elaborate. Historically, Operations teams have been isolated from Development teams. Two separate organizational entities. The reasons for this were manyfold: Operations people were a scarce resource, they needed to accommodate vast amounts of work for numerous Development teams…

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Archi & Techno

Software Craftsmanship and OPS scripting: a love story

Alright, story time fellas. TL;DR; We’re working with Terraform, layering and workspaces. This makes the standard `terraform workspace select x` pretty cumbersome and dangerous. We wrote a Ruby wrapper using Test-Driven Development. It allows us to have a tested, maintainable and efficient solution to the aforementioned issue. You can find the actual project here: https://github.com/sebiwi/terraform-wrapper If you keep reading, we’re going to talk about scripting, Test-Driven Development, Terraform and Ruby.

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Archi & Techno

Ansible Container: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Alright, here’s what’s up: TL;DR We tried Ansible Container. We’d rather keep using Dockerfiles for image builds: creating a Docker image and provisioning servers with Ansible are two very different things. Different in terms of lifecycle, philosophy and workflow. So different, that in our opinion, they’re not compatible. Wanna know why? Read on. Disclaimer: While the current status of Ansible Container is not clear, it seems that during the writing of this article the tool has been deprecated: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-container/commit/2fa778a7c8d1699672314ac0b89c53554f435cb7. After the limitations we noticed, we…

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Archi & Techno

The Wizard: Scenarios

This is another episode of the “The Wizard” series. If you haven’t read the previous episodes, you can find them here and here. You just don’t know how to do it. You’ve been thinking about it for a while too. It’s an important issue. The crafting of the spell is the most important part. The journey is usually more important than the destination itself. But you don’t feel like you are doing it right.

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Archi & Techno

The Wizard: Side effects

See the previous episode here. He has questions. Nevertheless, he has not yet arrived. And you know you have answers. You interrupt your summoning, and sit down. You can continue in another moment. Everything happens for a reason. You just hope the reason is good. N appears right next to you. Hey, what’s up? I'm setting up the auto-scaling configuration of the new project. Nothing huge. Cool. I need some help. He has progressed immensely since the last time you saw him. People are starting to…

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Archi & Techno

Kubernetes vs Swarm: Volumes!

Hey everybody! After reading both the Kubernetes and Docker “How does it work?” series, I guess you can’t wait to transform your old-school infrastructure and put all your applications inside containers. Indeed, containers are a great way to make your applications portable and easy to deploy. Nevertheless, there is a subject we have not discussed yet: data persistence.

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Agile

The Wizard: Ansible, Molecule and Test Driven Development

Magic has existed since the dawn of time. It has always been there, hidden in plain sight, making amazing things possible for those willing to open their eyes and harness its power. You can't remember the first time you used it, and yet it feels like you've never existed without it. You've obliterated endless armies of enemies by virtue of spells and enchantments, and you've also constructed awe-inspiring marvels from the ground up. As a result, you're renowned for your overwhelming powers in every single…

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Archi & Techno

Ansible reporting with ARA: Ansible Run Analysis

̛I had a Slack conversation with some friends from work (B, R and G) the other day. It went somewhat like this: B: “Hey, have you guys ever heard of ARA?” This was followed by 5 minutes of the deafening sound of contextualisation and Google searches by everyone on the channel. R: “Nope, but every piece of technology that could enable Ansible to catch up with PuppetDB/Board would be very much appreciated” G: “Reporting is cheating” (This statement makes way more sense in French) Me:…

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Archi & Techno

How does it work? Docker! Part 5: Get some work(ers) done!

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 5, regarding the actual implementation of the local cluster’s Worker nodes, using Vagrant, CoreOS and Ansible. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant and…

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Archi & Techno

How does it work? Docker! Part 4: Control your Swarm!

Hey there! TL;DR I hacked another thing together, this time in order to install a highly available Docker Swarm cluster on CoreOS (yeah, Container Linux), using Ansible. The whole subject was way too long for a single article. Therefore, I’ve divided it into 5 parts. This is episode 4, regarding the actual implementation of the local cluster’s Manager nodes, using Vagrant, CoreOS and Ansible. If you want to try it: git clone https://github.com/sebiwi/docker-coreos.git cd docker-coreos make up   You will need Ansible 2.2+, Docker, Vagrant…

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