Author archive
Notes on devops, configuration management, deployment pipelines and the occasional detour, written between 2011 and 2013.
Willie Wheeler writes the Zkybase field notes. He is a Principal Solutions Architect working on devops style automation for a large technology organization, using Java, Spring and Ruby to connect build, test, deployment and operations systems.
He has been a Java developer for 15 years and using Spring for eight. He is also the author of a book on the Spring Framework. More about the author and consulting work.
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 to get the…
Read entryIn 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…
Read entryAt 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, Facebook’s first release engineer and…
Read entry[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 get them interested…
Read entryOne 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…
Read entryMost 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…
Read entryWhere 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…
Read entryThis 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 with little…
Read entryOne 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 be…
Read entryI 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…
Read entryEstablishing a devops platform in an enterprise environment is challenging because there are a bunch of groups who own different pieces of the puzzle, and they will generally have different ideas on how to move forward…
Read entry“…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” —Melvin Conway Conway’s law is a well known fact of life in technology…
Read entrySometimes it’s easy to fall into myopic ways of seeing the world. Let’s talk about my favorite recent example, which is the so called “cowboy developer”. The cowboy developer, the thinking goes, is an organizational…
Read entryUntil fairly recently, I thought of devops mostly in terms of various sorts of automation: build, test, deployment, operations and SDLC. And while it’s true that automation is key to devops, I think it’s secondary to…
Read entryI wrote a small library called Kite a couple of years back, based on Michael Nygard’s outstanding book. Currently it has a circuit breaker and concurrency throttle. There are several others I’d like to add. [Update…
Read entryThis could be brogramming. It's not devops. Devops is a big deal nowadays, and there’s a variety of ways people describe it and its benefits. Here we’ll move past the fluffy characterization involving developers and…
Read entryThis one’s another quick screenshot post. Using, it’s easy to access public user and repo information via the GitHubTemplate. But if we want to access private information, or write capabilities, we need to use the…
Read entryIt’s been a little while since I’ve posted screenshots, so here’s the work in progress. I explain how to implement this stuff in chapter 11 of my book (Manning). App overview page Applications are a central concept in…
Read entryA major goal for Zkybase is to tie together the activities of developers, testers, release engineers and operations. A few major benefits are: Tool integration: We can single source app lists and more across…
Read entryHi all, Willie here. Happy New Year! In my last post, How NOT to collect configuration management data, I gave a quick rundown of some losing CM data approaches that I and others have attempted in the past. Most of…
Read entryHi all, Willie here. This time we’re going to step away from the keyboard and get architectural. But no ivory towers here. In my next two blog posts, I’m going to give you something that will get you out of lots of…
Read entryHi all, Willie here. Last time I told you that I’m building the CMDB using Neo4j and Spring Data Neo4j, and I was excited to get a lot of positive feedback about that. I showed a little code but not that much. In this…
Read entryZkybase is my first open source configuration management database (CMDB) effort, but it’s not the first time I’ve built a CMDB. At work a bunch of us built–and continue to build–a proprietary, internal system CMDB…
Read entryOne of the things we’re working on is an open source configuration management system called Zkybase. It’s a new project, and we’re still working out a lot of the high level vision for this thing. I’ll post more…
Read entry