A few months ago, I received a request to help out on a project to create a cookbook for Veeam Software specifically their Backup and Replication platform for Virtualized environments. Always up for a challenge, I started working on the project around the beginning of the year and was able to create a working model. Other […]
Ever misplace the key to your house? It really is annoying when you need to get back into your house. Even more so when you realize that you left your 8 week old puppy loose. If you call the locksmith, he will likely re-key your lock so you can get into the house but what […]
It is no secret that I love to automate everything. I also get a kick out of being able to deploy anywhere and anytime in a repeatable fashion. Recently, I had a need to deploy JFrog Artifactory as part of a project. In our case, the client is leveraging Artifactory to manage their packages and […]
These past few weeks have been quite hectic and interesting. I am working on a very large project to roll Chef out to a major client. Part of the goal is to improve compliance in the environment and by using Chef, we will standardize on the delivery of compliant servers based on the client’s requirements. Recently, […]
On July 5th, Chef announced the first 1.x release of their new flagship management platform – Automate. For those that are unfamiliar, Chef Automate provides several key solutions for Chef environments by providing Pipeline validation of cookbooks, compliance scanning, visibility into the state of Chef runs on the hosts. I have worked with Automate for […]
Over the many projects that I have built using Chef, I sometimes need to do a quick and dirty command to pull details from the node as part of the converge. Most often, I use these commands in my custom resources. Of course, the challenge has always been with the unit testing. ChefSpec is the […]
Several weeks ago, I started messing about with the NetApp Docker Volume Plugin (nDVP) and building a project for a client. Over the course of this past month, I had the opportunity to get a lot of keyboard time and test many of the features against ONTAP Cloud. In fact, the project is using multiple containers […]
Yesterday, I needed to add a few registry keys to a CHEF cookbook that I am developing for a client. I am creating a base OS cookbook for Windows and as part of the solution, we need to update registry keys. In the past, I have done some minor work with basic DWORD and REG_SZ values. In […]
One of my client’s CHEF developers recently contacted me about an issue that he saw in his unit testing. The week before, I had given my version of a CHEF boot camp for infrastructure teams and had stressed the need for testing code. This developer decided to retrofit some of his current cookbooks to focus […]
About a month ago, I spoke with a long time friend and we discussed the current challenges of automating NetApp’s ONTAP Cloud. Specifically, I pointed out that there had to be a better way to handle the provisioning of new systems. Currently, I have to pre-provision these ONTAP Cloud for AWS machines and then I can use them […]