In the engineering world, there’s no underestimating how hard it is to attract and retain top talent. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough. But you want to go one better than that. You want to attract talent that gives your organization a competitive edge. Once...
Recently I explained how to easily set up communication between a Puppet client and master. In this follow up post I’ll outline the steps involved in configuring the Puppet master to control the client machine. Starting out with Puppet does not have to be a...
Puppet is the most well-known configuration management tool in the DevOps world and used by systems administrators to centrally manage large numbers of servers and computer systems. There are several Puppet quickstart guides online. However, these guides are...
As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous article, we looked at the first three. For part 2, we pick up where we left off and talk about principles...
If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
In a simple, straight-forward implementation of a continuous integration pipeline you would typically create a chain of procedures that perform the same set of operations on the supplied input. This provides a build process that is well-defined, repeatable,...
The Electric Commander homepage allows you to bookmark links and job configurations for easy access. It's easy to add one or two, but if you have a lot of links and you want to share them with other users so that they have the same links as well, its a lot of work to...
When involved in IT strategy consulting services, you need a way to keep track of passwords in a safe and accessible manner. There are a number of different options out there ranging from single machine managers to cloud-based services. The one I found to be a great...
How Economizing can Hurt your Business There is a saying in some parts, “I am too poor to buy cheaply.” At first it sounds contradictory, but anyone who has bought something cheaply (electrical goods, car parts, computer equipment or any kind of service) and then...
The core activities of configuration management (i.e. changeset management and release management) are essential to control the changes made to a system and to administer the release of its different versions. However getting it wrong damages your brand, customer...
The paradigm of computing resource configurations have changed several times of the last 40 years. From mainframes to mini computers, through desktops and file servers to server farms, software as a service and the cloud. Any company that uses server farms or...
Picture your ideal company technological infrastructure. Servers to handle day to day tasks, servers to do engineering simulations, network equipment to handle communication, network-attached storage for your company critical data, and last but not least,...
