Day Two Cloud 041: Practical Automation In The Cloud And On Premises
On today’s Day Two Cloud, we discuss practical automation, including tools and tips to make automation work. In particular, we focus on deploying consistent, reliable builds for VMs across public cloud providers and on premises.
We also examine key issues such as the need to close the loop on automation processes, and how to ensure that one person doesn’t become either irreplaceable or a production bottleneck in an automation scheme.
Our guest is Larry Smith, Senior DevOps Engineer at BTA, an Atlanta-based technology consulting firm.
We discuss:
* What automation means in a practical sense
* The importance of closing the loop to ensure an automated process did what it was supposed to
* How to drive consistency across multiple environments
* Key tools such as Packer and Ansible
* When to build your own tools vs. using open source or COTS software
* More
Larry’s Takeaways:
* Validate a bunch of technical debt hasn’t been left behind.
* Document.
* Use open source when it makes sense, but not otherwise.
* Be consistent.
* Test repeatedly.
Show Links:
Larry Smith on GitHub
Larry Smith on Twitter
EverythingShouldBeVirtual – Larry’s blog