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/

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!