Author Archives: Willie Wheeler
Top ten pops and drops with Splunk, part 2
In our previous post, we looked at how to use Splunk to identify the most volatile event codes over the past day. In this post we’ll revisit that topic in light of some good feedback, and then look at how … Continue reading
Top ten pops and drops with Splunk, part 1
In real-time operational contexts, it’s important to monitor system metrics for major swings in value. Such swings, whether upward (“pops”) or downward (“drops”), often indicate a problem either on the horizon or else in progress. This can be a little … Continue reading
Posted in Big data, Operations
Tagged big data, measurement, monitoring, operations, reporting, splunk
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Pushing twice daily: our conversation with Facebook’s Chuck Rossi
At my new job we’re reigniting an effort to move to continuous delivery for our software releases. We figured that we could learn a thing or two from Facebook, so we reached out to Chuck Rossi, Facebook’s first release engineer … Continue reading
Posted in Continuous delivery, Devops principles
Tagged devops, facebook, process, release engineering
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How I got my kids into programming
[Not a devops post, but I wanted to share this somewhere.] I’m the father of four wild and crazy kids, and the two older ones are at the age now (4th grade and 1st grade) that I’ve started trying to … Continue reading
Designing configuration management schemas
One important issue that comes up when undertaking a configuration management effort is how to design “the schema” for configuration management data. Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. But there are a couple of general and complementary approaches you need … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Configuration management, Devops principles
Tagged architecture, configuration management, design, schema
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A fatal impedance mismatch for continuous delivery
Most of the time, when organizations pursue a continuous delivery capability, they’re doing that in pursuit of increased agility. They want to be able to release software at will, with as little delay between the decision to implement a feature … Continue reading
Large-scale continuous integration requires code modularity
Where large development teams and codebases are involved, code modularity is a key enabler for continuous delivery. At a high level this shouldn’t be too terribly surprising—it’s easier to move a larger number of smaller pieces through the deployment pipeline … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Continuous integration, Devops principles
Tagged architecture, continuous integration, modules
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Continuous integration with GitHub, Bamboo and Nexus
This is the first in what will be a series of posts on how to establish a continuous delivery pipeline. The eventual goal is to have an app that we can push out into production anytime we like, safely and … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Execution
Tagged bamboo, continuous delivery, continuous integration, github, kite, maven, sonatype
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When building a CMDB, separate the UI from the API
One lesson I’ve learned in building CMDBs is to cleanly separate the UI from the web service API. In the Java world, for example, this means that the API should be its own package (e.g., WAR file). The UI should … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Devops principles
Tagged api, architecture, cmdb, platform, scalability, services, testing, ui
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Tried everything and SSH with PKA still not working?
I recently ran into the situation in which I couldn’t get PKA to work when SSHing into my Ubuntu server. I checked the key pair (works fine SSHing into other servers), directory permissions, /etc/ssh/sshd_config, /var/log/auth.log, all that. Ran ssh -vvv … Continue reading