VirtualBox and Ansible

If you are interested in learning Ansible and\or just creating an Ansible test environment, VirtualBox can help you.

Steps to spinning up a VirtualBox Ansible test environment.  So easy!!!!

  1. Download and install VirtualBox
  2. Download your preferred Linux flavor.  In my case, I decided to us Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.  The following link will show you how to download and install a RHEL iso with VirtualBox.  Remember the Ansible “controller” is not supported on Windows yet.
  3. Since I used RHEL in step #2, I needed to perform the following command before proceeding with the Ansible install.  (Based on my experience)
    • Run the dhclient command to reconfigure the network interfaces
      • After this command, verify the contents of /etc/resolv.conf
    • Next, I needed to register and apply a subscription to my new test server.  The login\pw I used in step #2 will be used here when prompted.
      • subscription-manager register
      • subscription-manager attach –auto
  4. Net you will need to install Ansible on your new VM.  The following commands will prep your server and then install Ansible as needed.

Its really that easy!  I executed my commands via root, but if I were to have used another account, I may have needed to sudo the commands.

Another gotcha I an encountered was around proxy servers, so be aware that if your rpm\yum commands fail, you may need set your specific proxy server accordingly.

va

DevOps – 2 words that come to mind

So what are the 2 words that come to me when someone says DevOps?

  • Collaboration – This means that all teams practice strong collaboration between one another.  This doesn’t mean more email or messaging, this means sitting in the same area, participating in the same morning scrums, solving issues together, reviewing work together, etc…
  • Automation – This means looking at your build\deployment pipelines and other SDLC processes, and applying automation to them to produce predictable, repeatable, and reliable results.  (e.g. Automated CI deployments, automated notifications)

With collaboration and automation, we can continually delivery value throughout the SDLC.

Its really as simple as that for me.

Certified ScrumMaster

Early this year I took a ScrumMaster training course and then obtained the certification.  Overall I thought the course and instructor were very good.

Some of the key items that I took away from the class were as follows.

  • Importance of team retro’s
    • Because my team had been doing Scrum for so long, we kind of did away with retro’s.  I guess this is not out of the norm for mature teams.  Bottom line here is we started doing retro’s again.
  • Change is really ok and periodic change can be even better!
  • It is ok to carry stories over to the next sprint.
    • The sprint were the work is completed is the sprint that gets credit for the work
  • During morning Scrum’s, the team should really not speak directly to the Scrum Master, but rather the entire team
  • Add a “fun” element to the morning Scrum
    • Trivia
    • Dice shake
    • etc…
  • Only try to fix 1 item from the retro.
  • Know the 4+ Scrum meetings as it could be a test question
    • Sprint Planning (What and How)
    • Daily Scrum
    • Sprint Review
    • Spring Retro
    • Backlog Refinement (Unofficial)
  • Context switching between multiple project just doesn’t work…..

There were many other items, but those are the ones that stand out.

The certification test wasn’t bad as long as you paid attention in class. 🙂

CSM_Logo_626_561_Clear

Starting my blog…..

Starting up another blog.  My previous blog was on blogspot.com and ran for about 7 years.  Lots of good stuff, but time for a change, so I decided to try wordpress.com

Some of the DevOps topics and tools I will be blogging about are.

  • DevOps
  • ELK
  • Docker
  • AWS
  • Gradle
  • Ant
  • Maven
  • Ansible
  • TFS
  • Git\GitHub
  • Jenkins
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Scrum
  • Monitoring
  • etc…..