All my posts about Automation
Jenkins has always been a bit of an elephant in the room to me. Not being a developer I have always just shrugged it off a tool used for running unit tests, however, as I moving more into orchestration and automation I am finding the need for a tool which can run both tasks and unit tests, so this weekend I decided to finally take the plunge and have a play around with it. ...
This week I had to do a few installations of Puppet Enterprise on an EC2 instance. Although this seemed like a simple enough task, I did hit upon one annoying issue. I was doing a Monolithic installation as it was just for testing, I had done this several times on Digital Ocean↗ and locally using a Vagrant box↗ with no issue at all. Reading through the documenation I had to open the following ...
Around this time last year I blogged about Upgrading my servers to CentOS 7, the post contained a link to a script which I wrote to deploy a Puppet Master & Agent and some updated instructions for installing on RHEL / CentOS 7. As those instructions no longer work, and I needed to install a Puppet Master to have a play with I decided to update the installation script. After a little reading it looks like installing a Puppet Master with Apache and Passenger is a little old fashioned since the release of Puppet Server↗ . ...
I have watched numerous videos and seen quite a few slide decks which cover tools such as Puppet, Chef & Ansible. I have witnessed an entire rack of servers PXE boot, installing their base operating systems, configuring their services and then finally checking out a copy of a production ready codebase. Even after seeing this several times the old school sysadmin in me still thinks this is witchcraft. In the world of dedicated servers or virtual machines this is great, however when it comes launching an auto-scaling instance in a service such as Amazon Web Services using orchestration tools in real-time could be the difference in your application staying online or failing. ...
All of the posts on orchestration on here have been about Puppet on CentOS however last week I had need to script an AWS architecture and then launch instances built with Packer↗ into it. After much swearing I managed to hack together a python script which used Boto↗ to create a launch configuration and register it with an auto-scaling group, I then used a second script which re-cycled instances behind the Elastic Load Balancer which were launched with the previous launch configuration. ...
Yesterday, I had day out of the office with Danny↗ at the 2014 London PuppetCamp↗ . It was the first time I had attended a PuppetLabs event, though I have streamed plenty of video from past camps and conferences. It was interesting to see how best practices had moved on (answer, lots) since I first had my Puppet epiphany over a year ago. For me, and in no order, the most interesting talks were …. ...
==PLEASE NOTE: THESE INSTRUCTIONS ARE NOW OUTDATED, SEE THIS POST FOR AN UPDATE== After I dabbled with CentOS 7 a few weeks ago I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the few servers I run at DigitalOcean↗ to CentOS 7. I run two machines, one is a Puppet and Salt Master, the second runs Docker. Puppet Master Server A while back I added a few bash scripts to deploy both a Puppet Master & Agent↗ to GitHub, as Puppet provide a repo for CentOS 7 I decided to just update the installation script to use this repo and then give ago. I use stephenrjohnson/puppet↗ to deploy the Puppet Master. the Puppet part worked, however it failed to install Passenger and its Apache module because there is no mod_passenger available for CentOS 7 yet. To get around this I grabbed the require packages from The Foremans nightly builds↗ repo. This turned the initial yum install line into the following; ...
Having ran a local copy of OpenShift Origin↗ using VirtualBox↗ I decided to have a go at running it on a Digital Ocean↗ Droplet running CentOS 6.5. This should be easy as there is an installer↗ which claims; You’re one shell command away from deploying your own Platform as a Service. Well, sort of, after a few failed installs I finally managed it using the following (this assumes you are running a clean and minimal CentOS 6.5 installation) ...