Learn Chef, Puppet, configuration management, and automation (makerops.com)
Hi, I have a 9-5 in "devops" writing puppet/chef code, and do freelancing on the side, I am putting together a site to teach entry level, or even experienced admins who don't mess with development much, a way to get through the learning curve. If you write ruby, you have probably heard of railscasts, my goal is the be the railscasts for system admins, teaching openstack/aws's APIs, how to write chef/puppet providers and recipes/manifests respectively, and how to manage things on the server platform (open source chef/puppet servers) as well.
On the flip side, I aim to teach devs how to roll your own systems, in a safe, scalable manner.
What do you guys think, any suggestions?
14 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadOn the flip side, I aim to teach devs how to roll your own systems, in a safe, scalable manner.
What do you guys think, any suggestions?
I think that's a niche that needs to be filled. We don't have half as many devops as we need right now, partly because many companies haven't even realized they need this position in the team, but also because it's so hard to train people.
I agree there is a niche that needs to be filled, especially from a devs perspective, after reading about the startup that lost almost everything due to no backup, it re-affirmed my belief that even more so from a devs perspective, a good railscasts-like learning site will hopefully meet a need.
I am sure a similar thing is happening where you are based and it might be worth you going along to give talks and sharing your experience. It will help your site get exposure to the right audience if you respectfully mention it at the beginning or end of your talk.
Some constructive points: The copy on your site could use a tweak. There are a lot of unnecessary commas and strange grammar usage.
The mouse-over nav on your blog makes my eyes bleed, especially the colour of the tag line.
Consider putting your blog under your main subdomain (http://www.makerops.com/blog) rather than a separate sub-domain (http://blog.makerops.com). We did this recently and it dramatically improved our SEO as Google started using the content on our blog to rank our whole site.
Edit: Fixing my own grammar!
Being able to go and look at those sites to learn what the tools are and why I might need training would be useful--seeing the Chef docs might make me appreciate this service even more.
The deployment for an app I have involves building EC2 machines from scratch by means of a Fabric script, which is doing nothing more than connect to an EC2 instance through SSH and then invoke shell commands, like installing packages through "apt-get install", cloning the Git repo, compiling the project and copying configuration files.
This Fabric script is invoked by a Ruby script I wrote, that's using the AWS command-line tools under the hood, first creating an EC2 machine, then running the Fabric script on it, then creating an AMI (image) out of that machine.
Another Ruby script I have, also using the command line AWS tools, is creating auto-scaling groups out of prepared AMI images, properly configured, with auto-scaling policies based on latency, attaching those auto-scaling groups to our ELB load balancer.
This workflow of first creating an AMI image seems like overkill, however I like immutable snapshots of deployments, such that (a) we can run different versions in parallel to test new versions on only a small percentage of traffic and (b) in case shit happens, we can instantly revert to an older snapshot that is known to work (and problems can happen not only when you're breaking things in your code-base, but also when you install different versions of software packages or with faulty system-wide configuration files, so having a snapshot of the whole system is useful).
For me the question of Puppet or Chef has been neither. Both are way too complicated and problematic for what I wanted to do. I'm a developer and I solved my deployment needs by writing a bunch of scripts.
These, and probably others that I don't know, are the choices that someone, who believes in not pursuing in anything proprietary, that also wants to learn to build an OpenSource IaaS, or PaaS stack for their product- are researching into but cannot find a straightforward guide. Advocating working with OSS, and teaching people how to use OSS tools will lead to more jobs, so keep at it. I subscribed to your email list...