Why Not?

Netflix: Disgruntled customers rejoining service

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:52:37 -0400

Netflix: Disgruntled customers rejoining service:

Not surprised.

Day 1 User Reviews of Diablo 3: An Example of Gaming Companies that don't Understand Ops

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:33:23 -0400

Day 1 User Reviews of Diablo 3: An Example of Gaming Companies that don't Understand Ops:

Look at all the user reviews of Diablo 3 - most of them are negative. Why? Is it because the game sucks?

Not at all! It’s because people can’t log in to their battle.net accounts to authenticate that they are valid users. Now, this post isn’t about the crappiness of DRM in gaming. The point that I’m trying to show is how critical solid operations are to the user experience of your product. In the world of the internet, all consumer facing applications need to be able to handle web-scale user loads. The fact that no one can log in to play a single player game on LAUNCH DAY is absolutely ridiculous - there’s nothing that special happening on the server side of Diablo 3 that is different from how Google and Facebook run their servers. Look at companies like Etsy or Facebook - they have zero downtime and deploy new versions of they applications multiple times per day. How many times per week do MMOs have to go down so the ops teams can deploy new versions of their code?

The reason I’m so fascinated about this problem goes back to some amazing conversations I had with Seth Thomas and Jerry Chen at Devopsdays Austin back in April. Both of them are/were release engineers for the gaming industry and when I compare their stories to the stories of people in web ops, it’s astounding. What I learned is that the ops groups at gaming companies are inexperienced, lack investment, and very inclusive to how their operations work. On top of this, I am going to guess that the gaming industry doesn’t get much talent in the space of release and operations engineering - most of its workforce enters with experience in 3D technologies and/or networking. It is amazing (in a bad way) that situations like the Diablo 3 launch occur even though these web scale issues were solved years ago by companies like Google, Amazon, Flickr, and others.

IBM's Experience at Devops Days Austin 2012

Tue, 15 May 2012 07:43:38 -0400

IBM's Experience at Devops Days Austin 2012 :

A link to my writeup of my team’s experience at Devops Days Austin this past April.

Quick Tip: Testing XPATH Selectors in Chrome / Web Inspector

Sat, 12 May 2012 16:29:10 -0400

I’ve been playing around with some web scraping lately in Yahoo Pipes and have been dealing with creating XPath selectors.

If you ever have to work with XPath syntax and testing a selector, you can use Web Inspector’s console to test a page with the following syntax:

$x("//your/selector[@id='test']")

Rands In Repose: Two Universes

Wed, 09 May 2012 23:18:52 -0400

Rands In Repose: Two Universes

JavaScript on the XBox 360

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:10:18 -0400

JavaScript on the XBox 360

Ruby concurrency explained

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:25:30 -0400

Ruby concurrency explained:

AWESOME deep dive into the benefits and drawbacks of Ruby 1.9’s threading features.

3D Pop-up Book Using CSS 3D

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 09:10:23 -0400

3D Pop-up Book Using CSS 3D

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 00:07:50 -0400

Valve: How I Got Here, What It’s Like, and What I’m Doing

IBM Joins OpenStack

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 10:54:04 -0400

IBM Joins OpenStack

How to run VBScript from Notepad++

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:39:54 -0400

How to run VBScript from Notepad++

Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0 - Pat Shaughnessy

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 10:19:41 -0400

Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0 - Pat Shaughnessy:

Awesome (and easy to read) writeup of how Ruby 2.0’s garbage collection will take advantage of the copy-on-write method to save memory.

Time to be Classy Step 1: Open the following three links in...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 14:30:00 -0400

Time to be Classy

Step 1: Open the following three links in separate tabs:

Step 2: Enjoy

via Reddit

Notes from DevOps Days (Austin 2012) Presentations - Day 1

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:28:47 -0400

DevOps State of the Union Kickoff - John Willis

“DevOps is a cultural and professional movement” - Adam Jacob
All started when John Allspaw did a presentation at Velocity saying that Flickr does 10+ deploys a day
- DevOps Days Mountain View in 2009 really kicked off the movement because it got Velocity crowd and big name analysts to attend
- John Willis and Damon Edwards saw a ton of passion from this crowd
- Came up with the term “CLAMS”
  - Culture
    - “If you don’t get this right, don’t bother” - John Willis
    - DevOps is a human problem
      - You can have awesome dev and ops teams, but you have problems when
    - Lloyd Taylor is a great guy that talks about DevOps cultural issues
    - Where did we go wrong?
      - “We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.” - Larry Wall
      - People twisted this to be lazy for themselves instead of making the business more productive.
    - need Kaizen habits - constantly improving yourself
    - Enterprises don’t want to hear about the culture issues - at all
    - You’re not going to make things better by throwing Chef/Puppet into the mix, DevOps needs to overcome the cultural issues
  - Lean
  - Automation
  - Measurement
  - Sharing
Good Habits
- Trust
- Respect
- Communication
- No Victims
- The Smell Test
- Slay the Dragon
- Fearless Behavior
  - we live in a world the embraces failure
- Piercing the Veil
- Shaman No Arrogance
- “When we go into the war room, the problem is the enemy.”
- Lean IT vs. Lean Operations
- we have a ton of data about Lean IT
  - people “know” lean IT
- the breakdown is that we aren’t focusing those ideas in Ops
Seven Sins of DevOps
- Overproduction
- Delay
- Transporting
- Over-Processing
- Inventory
- Motion
  - in a non-devops culture, we focus on preventing things from happening
  - culturally, we need to be really good at expecting things will fail and recovering
- Defects
DevOps - What’s not working?
- The Name
- NoOps? Continuous Delivery? etc.
  - Why did no one have to discuss why “bug” and “debug” was a good term?
- No Definition
- The Church of DevOps
  - yelling at people for not using CM
- Automation Automation Automaton
- A billion deploys a day
DevOps what’s working?
- The Name
- No Definition
- The Church of DevOps
  - the group has great passion
- Automation Automation Automaton
- A billion deploys a day
DevOps has set the bar for quality

DevOps and Security - James Turnbull

Things I (James) hate about security
- Not being liked
- Not being affected
- Not being happy
IT thinks Security gets them in trouble and adds more work
Business thinks security says they have to slow down and can’t do things.
Security people think they are the wise jedi
What security isn’t
- it is not saying no
What security is
- You need to partner with people
- You’re a customer service person - need to service and protect the customer
- Allowing increased risk appetite
- Enabling the business to do business
Intersection of Security and DevOps
- Security people have same the same cultural issues as Dev and Ops people do
- Security tends to cry wolf, but there are legitimate problems that are harmful
How do you get security to understand what’s going on in Dev and Ops?
- it’s about culture
- Need to destroy the blame culture
- the problem is the enemy - not the business, customers, or users
Getting security to listen
- Speak the language!
- Let the business do business with the right controls
- Talking controls
  - Provisoning + Deployment: Efficiency
  - Configuration Management: Inconsistency is the enemy of security
    - CM systems make is super easy for a security guy to determine the state of the environment
  - Incident Management: Information is King
    - Centralized management system makes it easy to bring up the information about the system for a security incident
  - Audit: Magic away auditors
Ideas
- Get roles and responsibilities right
- Security people are skilled people too
- Risk register diving
  - problem list for security
  - all these risks tend to be about process, poor tooling, and consistency
Dev + Security
- Put Security people into Development
- Gather security requirements early
- Designed for security == Deployed sanely and securely
Ops + Security
- Embed Security into Ops escalation
- Invite Security to postmortems
- Expose Security to your metics and data
  - Security is really good at analyzing data for harmful behavior
Security is going through the same change Dev and Ops are - they are just as important in this movement

How a BigCo got Some Innovation Done - Michael Cote

Conclusions
- There are two types of people in the world - those who understand DevOps and those who don’t
  - Many people won’t understand what you’re talking about
  - What are some good metaphors?
    - soup vs. sandwich
      - soups are delicious, but once you put in the ingredients, you can just serve it
      - sandwiches are delicious, but it’s custom made at order time to one’s specifications
    - “And then what?” - talk about the 2-3 year strategy
    - speak through your customers
- Always be coding, not educating - Be comfortable with people not understanding, you can’t educate forever
  - Professorial Shiny Object Syndrome
  - Need to understand when to cut back on non-coding things
- Get Customers/Users ASAP - drives your own process, use to explain yourself
  - Find 10 customers, no matter what size, segment, geography
    - Once you have traction, you’ll be taken seriously
    - You can have your customers explain what you’re doing yourself
    - You’ll get excellent direction about what your should be doing
- Work in the Iron Triangle - when your young, being awesome, is better than being on time
  - features, quality, schedule
  - The older the project, the more the schedule matters
  - DevOps is young, so schedule is the lowest priority of the three
- Find the right context - getting pulled to do something is easier than pulling something along
  - Opportunistically look for chances to solve problems with your solutions
  - Avoid gratuitously selling and pleasing
- Hiding out - things are easier when no one knows they should care
  - carve out from the organization
  - Don’t over-hype and promise
    - Sets expectations that won’t match process
    - Creates pull for you to education
  - Hiding out implies you’ll have something worth-while once you emerge
  - Narrow your explanation of what you’re doing as needed, no matter what you’re actually doing
- Get by with just enough architecting and abstracting - you probably are gonna need it, but you can finish it later
  - “I really don’t know what I’ll need in the future”
  - Build a platform
  - Plan for the future
  - But don’t go crazy
  - You’ll argue this all the time
  - Creates strong dependency on organizational knowledge
- Don’t open source a box of junk - Bring something to the party
  - Roll up your pre-opening cabal of partners
  - If you’re service an open source ecosystem, being open yourself is probably easier
  - Know how to (internal) market OSS momentum
  - Partnerships are much easier
    - Mechanics of participation
    - Good enough is often good enough
Market the right stuff - Top-down marketing and bottom-up marketing
- practitioner-to-practitioner
- Marketing and PR from all angles
- BUT! you’d be surprised how hungry PR people are for genuine stories
What crowbar is
- Allows you to do bare metal provisioning of private clouds
- allows extensions/plug-ins called “barclamps”
History of Crowbar
- working on several private cloud systems
- Meat cloud
  - we have Bob do that
- March 2011
  - initial announcement
- July 2011
  - open sourced the project
  - lots of traction as a result
  - great for Dell because Crowbar is a platform they can build upon
- August 2011
  - Hadoop
- some more events that weren’t captured

Provisioning Panel

Differentiator of products
- Crowbar - Self documenting, great docs
- Chef - Search
- Pallet - Library
- Puppet - State tracking
- Cloudformation guy - cloud services
- Juju - events, casual scaling
Single step vs. two step configuration
- no preference, depends on context and what users need
Managing networking
- Puppet
  - has device management feature to run puppet on a node considered a proxy
- Opscode
  - Virtual network switches are on the radar
Sometimes deploying the tools takes longer than that app, how are they improving
- Crowbar
  - Claims it is extremely easy and simple to do so
- Opscode
  - provides a bootstrapper to help w/ installing chef
- Pallet
  - no installation because it’s a library
  - pushes out scripts to machines and runs them via SSH, so almost nothing to set up
- Puppet
  - provides cloud bootstrapper
  - has packages w/ major distros and on their site
- Cloudformation guy
  - Cloud deployments suck, simple as that
- Juju
  - apt-get install

Video

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 13:02:44 -0400

In Depth Analysis of Bioware's PR Strategy w/r/t the Mass Effect 3 Ending Fallout

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:53:41 -0400

In Depth Analysis of Bioware's PR Strategy w/r/t the Mass Effect 3 Ending Fallout:

To give some context, the player base of Mass Effect are extremely mad at the ending of the trilogy. This is due to the promises made waaay back in 2006-2007 that choices you make in Mass Effect 1 may affect the ending you receive at the end of the trilogy years later.

Well, years later arrived and it turns out that almost none of the choices you made along the path of the game affected the ending you received (WARNING: Spoilers).

As such, Bioware is dealing with nothing less than a shit storm of PR fallout. If you are interested in the strategy they are taking and want an inside man’s look at what they doing to address the fan base, I highly recommend checking the link above.

My take on this? None of it surprises me; I haven’t been that impressed with any of the Bioware games since Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). Most of their games have just felt like copies of the format KOTOR introduced and none have had the same magic that the Baldur’s Gate games had. Sure, Mass Effect is nothing like KOTOR, but beyond its dialog system, there is nothing special about it at all. The story is fairly bland, unsurprising, and the fighting system has nothing special about it at all.

I think this ending fiasco just officially made me never want to buy anything from Bioware again - I’m tired of being bored with their games.

IBM Pulse 2012: Tivoli gets the bleeding edge of tech

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:52:39 -0400

IBM Pulse 2012: Tivoli gets the bleeding edge of tech:

I attended my first IBM Pulse conference last week to help showcase the work my team and I have been doing since I left school last June. I know I’ve been fairly quiet on this blog about my current work, but the gist of it is that I’ve been part of the team that is making sure that IBM and Tivoli delivers on the idea of “DevOps” (or its other name, “continuous delivery”).

I had the pleasure of meeting Donnie (who wrote the above post and is a great guy to talk with) and I am wonderfully pleased to see that we succeeded on getting the message of DevOps delivered correctly. It’s been a great ride so far, but we still have a lot of work to do to make sure we deliver the capabilities we have been talking about.

If you are interested to hear more about what exactly I’ve been up to these past months, I recommend checking out this interview of Bill Higgins and Dan Berg from Pulse.

thefrogman: Back to the Future Meets Metal - 331Erock

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 23:35:37 -0400

thefrogman:

Back to the Future Meets Metal - 331Erock

Using OVF Images in VMWare Fusion

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:06:01 -0500

For an upcoming demo, I had to set up a couple of virtual images on my machine to act as app servers. The problem I had to deal with was how do I import them into VMWare Fusion 4 when they were made with ESX4 and Workstation 7?

Well it turned out that I needed to convert the virtual image from OVF format into VMX since Fusion does not read OVF (afaik).

To convert the image from OVF to VMX, you need to use VMWare’s ovftool:

Download and Install the ofvtool
Open a Terminal
Create a directory where you want the VMX image to live:

mkdir /path/to/vmx

Go to the directory where the ovftool lives:

cd /Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/

Run the ovftool on your ovf file:

./ovftool /path/to/file.ovf /path/to/vmx/file.vmx

The tool will then convert the file and copy the vmdk binary to the directory where your new VMX file will live. Once done, you can then use VMWare fusion to open your new VMX file and run the vm.

Use Messages as a Multi-Device Clipboard

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:14:28 -0500

Use Messages as a Multi-Device Clipboard