Automation isn’t just for manufacturing tasks. In fact, many of the grinding, repetitive tasks your engineers can’t stand can easily be automated out of existence. Any task that is repeatable is automatable. That means you can save big money on man hours, letting your...
Deploying modern software applications is a complex process involving many moving parts. Adding microservices into the mix amplifies this problem by further decentralizing applications, resulting in more deployment endpoints to track. With all those IP addresses...
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...
The servers that I’m managing can be divided into two groups, colo and local servers. While most of the configuration has been similar between these two, there have been a growing number of things which I’ve had to configure differently through Puppet. The latest...
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...
Recently, I was working on a custom API program for a customer, when I came across something that could be a sticky little problem for someone trying to add custom API programs to their PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager Environment. The problem was first manifested...
Recently, a customer came to me because they wanted to record when changes were promoted from their development environment to their test environment, and later from their test environment to their production environment. They wanted a way to simply tell when changes...
Redundant and repetitive tasks present a number of challenges for your business. Your engineering team feels bored, like they’re wasting their time. Pretty soon, they’re done being bored and looking for more challenging and rewarding work. With skilled engineers in...
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 other articles in this "Continuous Integration Best Practices" Series (click here for Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3", there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous articles, we covered the first eight. In...
As I noted in "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 1" and "Continuous Integration Best Practices—Part 2" there are 10 best practice principles associated with Continuous Integration and in this previous articles, we covered the first six. In this article, we...
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...