[clue] Devops at work?

[Charles Burton]

I'm starting to push us down that road, which is a fairly interesting
transition in research.  It's a slow process, but I'm laying the groundwork
for it right now.  For instance I've setup Salt to handle all the steps
involved in setting up new systems and built images that people can load on
the VM servers that just require setting the hostname and enabling Salt.
Then I tied it into Foreman and I've been working on building application
profiles so that people just select one from Foreman for whatever work they
want to do on their systems.  Next up is building the provisioning, but as
our leadership chose Citrix Xen a few years ago it's a bit tricky at the
moment.  That and we're dealing with lots of old crufty baggage from years
of cowboy ops that I'm still working on cleaning up.  I'm the biggest
change agent right now, but there is a lot coming down from above as well.
We're NOAA so we're subject to rules from the Government and those have
been the stick I've been using to effect change lately.  Basically I got
senior management on board, the Federal security  team, and started by
offering the carrot of a really good and easy to use platform backed by the
stick of if the DHS tells me to shut something off I'll do it immediately.

On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Sean LeBlanc <seanleblanc at comcast.net>
wrote:

> Anyone doing devops thing at work? Depending on what that may mean, of
> course...there is of course more the mindset and the collaboration and
> the processes and politics that may be updated or maybe completely
> disrupted (possibly in very good ways), but I'm also interested in
> specific technical/engineering practices. (*)
>
> Things like "literate devops", for example:
>
> http://www.howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/literate-devops.html
>
> What about pipelines in Jenkins and tools like
> Puppet/Chef/Docker/Vagrant/Ansible/Salt to provision systems and start
> incorporating more development practices (such as SCM) within the wider
> IT organization?
>
> How do you use those things? Have they paid off? Have you been a "change
> agent" pushing these sort of things to make your life better, or has it
> come from an external force (i.e., part of the command-and-control
> structure of a corporation) and "devops" means something quite different
> to them?
>
> I ask because I went to Denver BSides last year (and this year) and they
> had a panel of people to talk about DevOps, but not nearly enough time
> for all the questions they were getting from the audience. I got only
> one question in, and it was just before lunch, so there was a hard stop.
>
>
>
> (*) For instance, see here: http://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/
> What "devops" means seems to be a very fluid definition, much like
> "Agile" itself. There is definitely both engineering practices as well
> as the "what is visible to management, especially non-technical
> management" part within "Agile", especially Scrum, and that presents a
> very real problem when trying to talk about these subjects.
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