What exactly is value?
In the LEAN and DevOps worlds we're obsessed with the idea of providing value. But what is value really? Some times we use a word so much that it is drained of any practical meaning and becomes more of an abstract idea. It may not be too much of a stretch to say that the word "value" ceases to really contain any value. Webster defines "value" as: "a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged" "the ...
Reflections on 25 Years of LEAN
Gemba Academy has posted an extremely interesting series of videos entitled: Reflections on 25 Years of LEAN. Featured on the panel are LEAN luminaries Jim Womack (who introduced the Toyota Production System to the US and coined the term LEAN), John Shook (author of the seminal "Learning to See" book on value stream mapping), and Dan Jones (Founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy). The videos are interesting enough for anyone ...
SmartOS & Vagrant
There are many challenges associated with building applications in the cloud. One of the most challenging is that the cloud properly exploited is inherently transient. This means that your development environment must also be transient, such that you never depend on unfounded assumptions. Once upon a time you would routinely re-install your OS to ensure you weren't mistakenly assuming something were present. Moving development to a VM with a ...
Why SysAdmin’s Can’t Code
Most systems administrators are quick, perhaps too quick, to tell you "I'm not a coder." Oddly, this admission normally comes after boasting about how many programming languages they know or have used. Why is this? Can this be changed? Here is my 5 step plan on how any SA can become an honest to goodness programmer. Step 1: Find a problem you care about solving, for yourself SysAdmin's don't actually use tools, they study them. ...
Hadoop Analysis of Apache Logs Using Flume-NG, Hive and Pig
Big Data is the hotness, there is no doubt about it. Every year its just gotten bigger and bigger and shows no sign of slowing. There is a lot out there about big data, but despite the hype, there isn't a lot of good technical content for those who want to get started. The lack of technical how-to info is made worse by the fact that many Hadoop projects have moved their documentation around over time and Google searches commonly point to ...
Heavy Metal: A Brief Guide to the Djent Revolution
2012 has been a great year for metal fans, and in particular, for the more mature metal fan. Maybe you've noticed, the headbanging demographic has slowly been changing, as seen best by "That Metal Show": There are lots of great metal bands, but a lot of our old favorites fail to really evolve and after decades of rockin' to Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, etc, you just need something new, something more evolved, and complex. A critical element ...
iPXE: Now with Native Menus and SmartOS Support
If you've never heard of iPXE, it is the official fork of gPXE, which was the ultimate result of the Etherboot Project of old. Apparently there was a power struggle that caused the primary contributors to leave Etherboot/gPXE and they renamed gPXE to iPXE to distinguish. Technically gPXE still exists, but for all intents and purposes its a dead project. If you are completely unfamiliar with both iPXE and gPXE let me summarize. The ...
Writing a Better SOP
Within an ops team you should have 3 primary types of governance enablers: controls, policies and processes. A control is a guiding principle, which is implemented as a one or more policies (which are just rules), which are in turn standardized in a set of procedures. Its important to have all 3, because controls are very vague, policies are often general and broad in nature, which means to provide consistent quality results we require ...
Configuration Management on SmartOS
Over the last couple days I added a bunch of SmartOS documentation on getting the major configuration management solutions working. Pointers for CFengine3 and Puppet are there with the basics on getting started. I added extensive documentation for Chef, suitable for even users entirely new to Chef. I've also populated a Github repo with cookbooks, Knife bootstraps, and a full framework for using Chef Solo with SmartOS. Go find all the docs ...
A Return to Linux on the Workstation
In my day to day work I rely on two systems, a MacBook Pro and a custom built PC workstation. My Mac is used for all my travel needs and communications (email, Jabber, Skype, etc). All my "real work" is done on the workstation which I refresh to the latest and greatest every 3-4 years, run dual headed, etc. Up until about 30 days ago my primary workstation ran some variety of Solaris for nearly 10 years, starting with Solaris 9 when X86 ...