Dragon Drop #2

Our next installment of Dragon Drop. Let's dive right in.

The Goods

Buggy Software Foils Dreams of Infrastructure-as-Code

Really interesting take on the complexity around infrastructure-as-code. This, to me, speaks of growing pains and the inevitable improvements that today's continuous integration and orchestration tools need to endure. Infrastructure-as-code is still effectively a nascent movement. The concept's there. There are tools and programming languages and great intentions. It'll just take us a while to find that balance where quality, functionality and security work together. Same could be said of any technology-based solution…

How Walmart scaled Puppet to 55,000 nodes...and beyond

from Puppet

Speaking of infrastructure-as-code, this is an account of how Walmart was able to scale their configuration management solution, in this case Puppet, to a large size. The exercise they went through, of trying to scale out nodes, failing and then refactoring & continuing to scale out nodes, is just the sort of thing that the article above hints at. The notion of trust and empowerment being necessary to succeed with an endeavour like this certainly rings true for me. How about you? Let me know in the comments.

Using enums in PowerShell

by Adam Bertram

Great example of how to use a data type to great effect. For all the PowerShell programmers and scripters out there, if you haven't heard of enums before, make sure you read this article. I think that you'll find that enums can be quite useful. Adam's example, of needing to restrict a series of choices for the purposes of determining which OUs within which users can be created, easily has a wider possible use. Think about a fixed list of networks or datastores that you can connect your VMs too. Or setting tags on VMs from a predefined list. Very useful and powerful stuff.

Using Dropbox, Git, and OneDrive for Individual Source Control

by Chris Wahl

Coming from a predominantly operations-based IT background, good source control habits are still a bit more magic than science. Source control just wasn't really a thing when I took CompSci in university. Here Chris provides an overview of his method for checking in and synchronizing the code he works on on a regular basis. Simple, yet effective.

The Wrap

Well, that's a very (infrastructure-as-)code focused set of articles today. If you're in IT, whether development or operations, it behooves you to get ever more familiar and comfortable with code. Even if infrastructure-as-code is painful and fraught with problems today, it's still the future for all of us.

Featured image photo by muammerokumus