LJCConf “Chuck Norris Doesn’t Need DevOps” Slides

The LJC ran it’s ever-popular annual Open Conference on Saturday 23rd November, and this was the first time I’ve made it along. To say I was impressed was an understatement, and I’ll try and capture some more thoughts in a later blog post, but for the moment I wanted to share the slides from the main presentation I delivered “Chuck Norris Doesn’t Need DevOps”

 

Can’t see the presentation slides? Please click here http://www.slideshare.net/dbryant_uk/2013-ljcconf-chuck-norris-doesnt-need-devops

The original pitch for the talk was as follows:

“We all hear the term “DevOps” being thrown around on a daily basis, but what does it actually mean? With a little help from everyone’s favourite 80’s action hero, we’ll undergo a whistle-stop tour of the philosophy, culture and tooling behind this buzzword, specifically aimed at Java Developers.

We’ll also look at a real-world case study from Instant Access Technologies Ltd, and explore the key role that DevOps has played during a successful upgrade of the epoints customer loyalty platform to support increasing traffic. The core discussion will focus on the challenges encountered as we moved from a monolithic app deployed into a data centre on a ‘big bang’ schedule, to a platform of loosely-coupled components, all being continuously deployed into the Cloud.”

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation! The feedback was most welcome, and the questions were great. If anyone wants to add anything further than please feel free to comment, email or tweet at me!

[Book Review] Instant Chef Starter

Instant Chef Starter – by John Ewart

TL;DR If you are looking for a rapid introduction to Chef, and haven’t got the time (or inclination) to look around the web then this book will meet your needs. However (and it’s a fairly big however), you can get pretty much the same information free from a combination of the excellent Opscode (Chef creators) website and a few Blogs resulting from a web search.

Anyone active within the so-called DevOps space will have heard of tools like Chef, Puppet, CFEngine and Saltstack. These provisioning tools are arguably the backbone on which the modern DevOps movement is based, and in combination with Cloud-based programmable infrastructure (like AWS) they are the driving force in automating configuration and application deployment. Understandably everyone is keen to write books on what is rapidly becoming the next big thing, and in my opinion this does lead to rushed output. This output is often useful to a limited degree, but the same information can often be gleaned (freely) from the interweb, and (perhaps more importantly) tools and techniques on the bleeding edge often evolve so fast that any printed media can become outdated quite quickly. I believe ‘Instant Chef Starter’ book fits into this category.

If you are looking for a book to read on the commute home, which details the key concepts and motivations behind Chef, then you can’t go wrong with getting the Kindle version of this book. However, you will definitely need to supplement your reading by checking the Opscode website for latest developments, and you will also need to start experimenting with the tool to fully understand the benefits it offers. Trust me, when you start spinning up Chef-driven servers and other resource with just a couple of commands via the CLI you are going to be blown away at how easy this stuff is. Your mind will be further blown when you realise that what you’ve just done is massively repeatable and scales very easily (in comparison to older techniques).

In summary, the Kindle version is worth a look if you’re looking for a fast-paced and concise introduction to Chef, and you don’t want to invest time in looking around the Opscode website or other provisioning websites just yet. I can’t recommend the printed book, because at £12 this doesn’t offer good value.

Click Here to buy ‘Instant Chef Starter’ on Amazon (This is a sponsored link. Please click through and help a fellow developer to buy some more books!  )

Hosted Chef, Vagrant and ‘There may already be a client named “vagrant.vm”‘…

I’ve been playing around with Chef again this afternoon, and ran into a problem after following the (very useful) Opscode tutorials and then experimenting on my own

The Problem

localhost ==============================================================
localhost
localhost Chef encountered an error attempting to create the client "vagrant.vm"
localhost
localhost ==============================================================
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost Authorization Error:
localhost
localhost --------------------
localhost
localhost Your validation client is not authorized to create the client for this node (HTTP 403).
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost
localhost Possible Causes:
localhost
localhost ----------------
localhost
localhost * There may already be a client named "vagrant.vm"
localhost
localhost * Your validation client (xxxxxx-validator) may have misconfigured authorization permissions.
localhost

It’s quite obvious that my earlier tutorial-based activities had registered the ‘vagrant.vm’ node name with my hosted Chef. Accordingly I visited my Hosted Chef portal and removed the node, but after receiving confirmation of the node being deleted I was still getting the same error when attempting to provision my local vm box.

Solution

Give the second Vagrant node a new name when bootstrapping e.g.

$ knife bootstrap localhost \
 --ssh-user vagrant \
 --ssh-password vagrant \
 --ssh-port 2222 \
 --run-list "recipe[apt]" \
 --sudo \
 --node-name "vagrant.vm2"

Alternatively you can delete the first node you created via knife on the CLI (rather than attempting to delete the node via the web-based Hosted Chef interface):

$ knife node delete "vagrant.vm"