I did not have any major preconceptions of how a DevOps Engineer role at a start-up would be like, so now after two months into this role, I find the pace not two bad but the "progress" to slow - maybe.
I started at the same time as one other DevOps engineer, and we have paired up so far to cover some of the work "assigned" to us. After two months we have only achieved two successes. I am not sure two successes in two months for the two of us is good or bad progress... I have no metrics to compare with...
Admittedly, we are spending lots of time and effort in learning and trailing new things - most come to nothing or can not be immediately implemented, but we are making small improvements with small steps. So if we carry on as such we should be able to make major progress at some point - the fundamental technique of DevOps is to be able to change our way of working pretty fast to be able deal with changes with the knowledge we have and the processess/systems we've created.
Saturday, 2 December 2017
Tuesday, 7 November 2017
1 month into DevOps
It's been over a month now since I became a DevOps engineer. It has been quite exciting to be honest. There are and have been some major issues but the way of working has enabled me/us to approach the whole situation with a very positive outlook, if this is the way we mean to carry on.
Working for an ISP, you would expect internet connectivity to be the major infrastructure to sure up as a pillar of the company. So during the fourth week of my new role we had a major outage - there was a broken uplink from our provider - which left us with a three hours internet outage. This outage affected us as much as our customers and clients.
Working for any other company, I would have expected managers and directors to fly off the handle, blaming everyone else but themselves to why we had no secondary (redundant) link, or whatever angry and illogical reasoning they could muster in a panic. But none of this happened here. Instead, our CTO handed out flash cards and asked us to write down any observations we could make about the situation, while he investigated and make few phone calls to ascertainment the situation.
After 20 mins or so, once we found out that our intermediate connection was broken and we gathered we could not do anything but wait for the fix, we formed a round the table team and started work on all the immediate things we to do while we waited. This allowed us to prioritise and bring forward a few tasks (five or so) from our backlog. Energy was then was used effectively to complete these tasks which otherwise would have stayed in the backlog for a while more.
So instead of wasting time doing nothing while we waited for the fix, we focused and cleared some of the much needed backlogs.
Working for an ISP, you would expect internet connectivity to be the major infrastructure to sure up as a pillar of the company. So during the fourth week of my new role we had a major outage - there was a broken uplink from our provider - which left us with a three hours internet outage. This outage affected us as much as our customers and clients.
Working for any other company, I would have expected managers and directors to fly off the handle, blaming everyone else but themselves to why we had no secondary (redundant) link, or whatever angry and illogical reasoning they could muster in a panic. But none of this happened here. Instead, our CTO handed out flash cards and asked us to write down any observations we could make about the situation, while he investigated and make few phone calls to ascertainment the situation.
After 20 mins or so, once we found out that our intermediate connection was broken and we gathered we could not do anything but wait for the fix, we formed a round the table team and started work on all the immediate things we to do while we waited. This allowed us to prioritise and bring forward a few tasks (five or so) from our backlog. Energy was then was used effectively to complete these tasks which otherwise would have stayed in the backlog for a while more.
So instead of wasting time doing nothing while we waited for the fix, we focused and cleared some of the much needed backlogs.
Saturday, 14 October 2017
Two weeks into DevOps
It has now been two weeks since the start of my new DevOps role in a tech start-up company. It hasn't been too bad. It has certainly been interesting new work and job satisfaction to go with it.
The first week was essentially spent getting to know the environment, tools and the way of working. Very typical of an agile start-up company, the way we did it was to be assigned on an important and urgently needed to be completed project. And of course the way we attempted the project was using DevOps tools - Ansible, VMs and Git. However, any other tools we needed and the way we did it was open for adoption and discussion with a flexible but pragmatic approach.
The overarching philosophy that is constantly influencing is a test driven approach. This approach has been adopted a lot readily in software or application development and wholly in extreme programming, but I am certainly unsure how we adopt this approach in DevOps, especially with regards to the ops or system side of implementation. The difficulty arises with we are implementing something completely new and those tests have not been established or even thought about as we have not developed anything to test!
However, this graphic found on Wikipedia gives a clue to how this TDD might pan out with our first project.
The idea is that we quickly knock up a solution. Then quick knock up tests for that solution. Then subsequently improve the solution using the failed tests and then improve the tests that will improve the solution! Hmmmm... Not sure, maybe you can advise. The other main issue with no established working patterns and tests is that we don't want to spend more time establishing the testing infrastructure for our project than actually working on the project!
How fast can we implement a Test Kitchen for our project? https://dantehranian.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/testing-ansible-roles-with-test-kitchen/
The first week was essentially spent getting to know the environment, tools and the way of working. Very typical of an agile start-up company, the way we did it was to be assigned on an important and urgently needed to be completed project. And of course the way we attempted the project was using DevOps tools - Ansible, VMs and Git. However, any other tools we needed and the way we did it was open for adoption and discussion with a flexible but pragmatic approach.
The overarching philosophy that is constantly influencing is a test driven approach. This approach has been adopted a lot readily in software or application development and wholly in extreme programming, but I am certainly unsure how we adopt this approach in DevOps, especially with regards to the ops or system side of implementation. The difficulty arises with we are implementing something completely new and those tests have not been established or even thought about as we have not developed anything to test!
However, this graphic found on Wikipedia gives a clue to how this TDD might pan out with our first project.
The idea is that we quickly knock up a solution. Then quick knock up tests for that solution. Then subsequently improve the solution using the failed tests and then improve the tests that will improve the solution! Hmmmm... Not sure, maybe you can advise. The other main issue with no established working patterns and tests is that we don't want to spend more time establishing the testing infrastructure for our project than actually working on the project!
How fast can we implement a Test Kitchen for our project? https://dantehranian.wordpress.com/2015/06/18/testing-ansible-roles-with-test-kitchen/
Monday, 2 October 2017
DevOps Tools
So end of my first day - what did I think?
Overall very good and it was a mixed day too - like DevOps ought to be. I can remember my first day in my previous job and we did nothing. In fact I did nothing for at least 2 weeks!
This time around, I got to visit the old and the latest cabinets to get an indication of where my current startup company begun and how much progress they've made. We met sheep and cows on the field trip too!
So what are we using for our DevOps tools? Hipchat, 1password, Git, Mac Mini, Jira, Ansible, FreeBSD and VirtualBox to name a few that we got our hands on today... And unlike my first day at my old job where I requested a Mac for my desktop and got a straight - no - this time I was immediately handed a MacBook Pro and used iCal, MacMail, Safari and most usefully... Terminal!
So what did we do? We selected two items from the backlog of things that need doing. Used Jira (using Structure plugin) to describe what we wanted/need to do by breaking down the bigger task in to smaller pieces of logical work and then used Ansible to describe how we do or did it as we were doing it. It was also a 'training session' or process guide as such and still more to come...
Icinga2, Grafana, Influxdb, Neo4j and of course Python... And oh yes, brew on Mac OS X! And now iTerm has replaced Terminal due to my suggestion!
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
Final week of my notice period before joining new start-up
I am in my final week's notice period.
Today I met my DevOps team in a greet and meet session with the other DevOps recruit that will be starting at the same time as me next week.
We talked to our team leader and discussed various things - including what sort of DevOps team he plans to run. After a three month process of recruitment he is just as excited to start as we are.
I am certainly looking forward to next week and the end of this week for sure!
Today I met my DevOps team in a greet and meet session with the other DevOps recruit that will be starting at the same time as me next week.
We talked to our team leader and discussed various things - including what sort of DevOps team he plans to run. After a three month process of recruitment he is just as excited to start as we are.
I am certainly looking forward to next week and the end of this week for sure!
Saturday, 19 August 2017
DevOps Engineer Role
I am currently serving my notice as a Senior Systems Administrator/Specialist role. After 16 years working within an IT Services department at two UK educational establishments, I have finally achieved a role in the private sector.
For the past three years or so, I have been learning more and more about DevOps and Agile working. As a systems administrator in Systems and Operations, it is difficult to encourage and promote the DevOps ways of working. Bringing Systems development and operations together is just a big struggle in a slow moving, dinosaur paced environment. It is time to eject from this environment and join the real world.
I am going to be joining a start-up enterprise less than three years old! This start-up is currently doing some major recruitment to kickstart their business and they are 'doing' DevOps from the very start. This is a perfect situation to be in - as an employee and as a company. Try fast, fail fast, learn fast, succeed fast! This is the DevOps philosophy at it core!
I am excited indeed! I will be keeping this DevOps blog to detail my progress, failures and acheivements - when I can. I hope you will be able to join me on this journey!
For the past three years or so, I have been learning more and more about DevOps and Agile working. As a systems administrator in Systems and Operations, it is difficult to encourage and promote the DevOps ways of working. Bringing Systems development and operations together is just a big struggle in a slow moving, dinosaur paced environment. It is time to eject from this environment and join the real world.
I am going to be joining a start-up enterprise less than three years old! This start-up is currently doing some major recruitment to kickstart their business and they are 'doing' DevOps from the very start. This is a perfect situation to be in - as an employee and as a company. Try fast, fail fast, learn fast, succeed fast! This is the DevOps philosophy at it core!
I am excited indeed! I will be keeping this DevOps blog to detail my progress, failures and acheivements - when I can. I hope you will be able to join me on this journey!
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