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Category: Technology

Posts about technical topics.

Where Lambda falls short

Where Lambda falls short

Published by Martin Smith on November 15, 2016

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about the Cloud Computing movement. I’ve made the case before that functions-as-a-service, and ‘Serverless’ in general, are the next step in that evolution in utility based computing. But are Serverless technologies ready for prime time? Specifically, is AWS Lambda ready for mass deployment? I recently had to roll out a small Python-based service using AWS Lambda, and as a result of that experience, I’d say Lambda still has a few shortfalls that need to be addressed.

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Can DevOps and Remote Work learn from each other?

Can DevOps and Remote Work learn from each other?

Published by Martin Smith on September 7, 2016

More people than ever are working from home. Estimates range from 10% (in the least remote-work-friendly countries) to 60% in the United States. Even global data shows that half of all workers may be remote by 2020. DevOps, the cultural movement towards more agile systems administration, has also been gaining traction. Gartner estimates that 25% of global 2000 businesses will employ DevOps as a mainstream strategy by 2016.

So what can DevOps and Remote Work learn from each other?

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New profiling feature in chef-client 12.6.0Profiling a Chef Run

New profiling feature in chef-client 12.6.0

Published by Martin Smith on January 4, 2016

I subscribe to the Chef blog in my RSS reader, The Old Reader, so that I can stay up to date with recent releases and changes happening in the community and in the various software projects that make up, “Chef.” Recently, I saw the release announcement for chef-client 12.6.0. I scrutinize these especially closely, as they’re an easy way to follow along with major upcoming changes that I might encounter.

One particular feature that stuck out in the release notes was a new option, [shell]–profile-ruby[/shell].

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Test-Kitchen & Serverspec with Windows guestsTest-Kitchen on Windows

Test-Kitchen & Serverspec with Windows guests

Published by Martin Smith on December 28, 2015

Earlier this year, I attended ChefConf 2015 in Santa Clara where I attended the Hack Day at Microsoft on Friday. While I spent most of that day working on various projects like kitchen-rackspace with Jonathan Hartman, I also tested the upcoming test-kitchen 1.4 release upon Fletcher‘s request. Among the release notes was something I would encounter a few months later in November:

Note that this release has the much-fabled “Windows guest support.”

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Top DevOps Meetups in the USAMeetup.com Logo

Top DevOps Meetups in the USA

Published by Martin Smith on November 13, 2015

Earlier this week, ProfitBricks, a leading cloud-computing company in high-end IaaS, released their list of “Top DevOps Meetups & Their Leaders: 49 Meetups For DevOps Pros,” and the Gainesville DevOps Meetup & I have made the list. And, I’m in good company to boot!

I have to admit, this surprised me somewhat, as it’s only been around since last year. It’s had great attendance, however, and we’ve been meeting & talking about a ton of really interesting topics, like Let’s Encrypt, Infrastructure as Code, Containers, ChatOps, and Continuous Delivery. We’ve also talked at length about the annual State of DevOps reports as they come out.

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