Automation
I am a fan of DigitalOcean. What they lack in breath of services they more than make up for with the ease of use, documentation, and tutorials. Last year, I overhauled this website to be driven by Ansible. This year, I want to take this automation to the next level. There are capability gaps...
Ansible
This project hasn’t been touched in a few months so last night I embarked to give it a spin. It failed. Miserably. So I went bug-hunting and got it working again. Resolved Issues centos-base Removed packages no longer available that were causing role to fail. Added package Glances to replace...
Process Improvement
We have a lot of build processes that utilize Terraform to perform destroy and apply command. This results in a ton of terraform inits that download the same provider plugins over and over again. You can recover this download time and reduce the risk of Hashicorp giving you the banhammer (which...
Ansible
“Done. For now…” All of my goals for the first re-architecture of this website are now complete. This evening I fixed the backup script, added a role that installed EFF’s certbot, and updated the README to reflect the current status. You can see what’s new here...
Ansible
“Baby steps.” I’ve added a single change today. There’s new role that will install and configure the DigitalOcean monitoring agent. In the coming days, I’ve got a few more items to wrap up. Once those (minor) missing pieces are in place, I will call this project done and move on to something...
Ansible
“Automate all the things!” This weekend I’ve been busy laying much of the groundwork requires to be able to re-deploy this website. In part one, I provided a diagram that showed how the entire website, including the database, is deployed on a single droplet (VM). While this model has worked well...
Cloud
Let’s embark on a journey to re-architect this website to something that is more resilient. Currently, the entire website runs on a single DigitalOcean droplet. Backups are handled through a Bash script that zips up the application directory, dumps the DB, and tars up the output. This could be...
Atlassian
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be doing write-ups on how I upgrade some of our developer tools. Specifically, I’ll focus on the Atlassian applications I manage, but the process for our other tools (like Artifactory, SonarQube, etc.) is largely the same and most of the Ansible Roles are common...
Automation
It’s pretty cool to build something that people grow to rely on. It’s also a little terrifying for someone like me who has a habit of second guessing decisions and who tends to be risk adverse. A few years back, the developer who writes our installers made changes to enable them to run in...
Atlassian
I originally created this blog as a way to document my career-work. I have a real passion for what I do and I truly enjoy sitting down and looking for refinements in an existing system or process. Still, my personal passion is not my career. I draw a clear line between my personal interests and … →
Process Improvement
I don’t use this much. But I pay for hosting and run for daily backups. It seems like a waste. In typical tech fashion, it’s time for a PIVOT so I can MAXIMIZE MARKET SHARE AND INCREASE PROFITABILITY. I was able to test how good my backups were today by standing this site back up … →
Automation
I just wanted to give a quick shout out to uptimerobot.com. For what it is, it’s fantastic. I wish the polling interval was better than every 300 sec. but you get what you pay for which is nothing. It’s free. It’s a great tool.