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?
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.”
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.
Many companies use configuration management tools to manage their cloud servers and other cloud infrastructure. But some configuration management tools are now also enabling users to not just manage cloud servers, but actually create the servers as well. As part of the DevOps Automation Service, I most often work with a popular configuration management tool called Chef. Working in conjunction with Chef, there is also a project called Chef Provisioning that can use APIs to build cloud servers and Docker containers on many different providers (AWS, Azure, OpenStack, etc). Chef Provisioning can then bootstrap the new instance or container and begin configuration management tasks.
I’d like to introduce one specific driver for Chef Provisioning, the chef-provisioning-fog driver. This driver can be used with Chef Provisioning to build Rackspace cloud servers with simple Chef recipes. I will show an example of how to use these tools to automate building cloud servers, and provide you with an example you can try locally.
