Author: elvisboats

Short Version: I'm married to the amazing (and amazingly forgiving) Jennifer, proud possessor of two amazing kids, crazy about all things trouty with fly fishing. I'm an Application Development Manager with Microsoft, and am based out of Portland, Oregon. Long Version: I grew up in Oregon, and moved down to California with the original goal of finishing my education in Civil Engineering, but I found application development and RDBMS systems much more exciting! I do miss the mountain biking in California and the awesome Mexican food, but Oregon is my home and I have never regretted moving back to start a family. Plus it gives me more time for fly fishing for trout and steelhead on the beautiful Deschutes river in central Oregon! ;-) Working for Microsoft has by far been the best experience of my professional life; it's great working with a group of people that are passionate about writing good code and continually improving development practices and firepower. Past assignments have included Providence Health Plans, Kroger, and managing a .NET development team at Columbia Sportswear. Working at Columbia in particular gave me a great customer-side perspective on the advantages that Azure offers a fast-moving development team, the dos and don’ts of agile development/scrum, and the cool rich Ux experiences that SPAs (Single Page Applications) can offer with Breeze, OData, WebAPI, and modern Javascript libraries. Microsoft did a fantastic job of engaging with Columbia and understanding our background and needs; I witnessed their teams win over an initially hostile and change-averse culture. The end result was a very satisfying and mutually beneficial partnership that allowed Columbia to build dynamic applications and services using best-of-breed architecture. I’m a MCDBA and a Certified Scrum Master.

A little something on that dirty word… money.

Just a little riff on personal finances.

Had the pleasure recently of reading “The Debt Free Spending Plan“. It’s very practical and pragmatic in dealing with debt and managing money. For too many of us, we’re never taught personal finance like we are other essential topics like math, reading, etc in school. As a result – and I think this is deliberate – we get stuck in these cycles with large amounts of credit card debt and spending on things we really can’t afford or even enjoy. I know in my case – when I think of my household expenses (and fishing equipment!) – I tend to think of my house as being a type of colander. I dump money into it and it just runs out the bottom!

So, time to put some thinking into managing a budget. The book is fairly long; I’ll boil it down to the essentials, and you can think about picking it up on your own.

  1. Gather up all your credit cards and freeze them. (Some people literally freeze them into a block of ice in their freezer – so before they use them, they have to defrost it!)
  2. Make up a monthly budget. (more on this below) Everything should be categorized, from income – to Bills and lastly Daily Needs (fuel, food, etc).
  3. Total this up. What’s left over – the balance – can go into Short Term Savings (for things like car expenses that are impossible to predict), Long Term Savings (a buffer), and lastly Fun Money (vacation getaways, fishing gear, etc).
  4. The basic principle is you should always be running in the black. ONce you do step #3 above you will know how much you have to live on each month. You should have money set aside even when you say things like “Oh, I never buy clothes.” Stick cash for clothing – even if just $10 – into an envelope. You can stash it or spend it – but don’t forget to save up for that category. Make sure money is left over for fun and vacation $, even if just a few dollars each month.
  5. You will need to go through this budget every month on the 28th and refactor. Add $ where it’s called for to each category, or take it away. The author recommends picking a category each month (like Gym, for example) and seeing if you can reduce it. could you go to a less snazzy gym and save a few bucks for fun money?
  6. Now buy a notebook. (Or use Mint for us tech savvy types!) Each daily need should have its own tab, with the $ you have to spend on it on the title. (Fuel – $275 for example). Once each day, you will take your receipts – or your debit card expenses – and write down what you’ve spent on each category and update the running total. (2/6/2015 Chevron -$46 = $184.84, for example)
  7. Have two savings accounts – a short term savings and a healthy reserves for emergencies.

There’s some other money saving tips there that she explores in more detail – avoiding bulk stores (it encourages overspending), cooking at home, getting a cheaper cell phone etc with three quotes minimum for any major purchase, using a HSA/Medical Savings Plan, etc. But in short it’s a nice and sweet little 5-step program:

  1. Plan for monthly bills and daily needs.
  2. Keep a running total of daily needs spending.
  3. Have a bill payment plan where bills are paid each month automatically
  4. Have a savings account for what you want and need
  5. Keep a record of all of the above.

 

That’s it! Nice and simple. I’m going to give this a try – and see if it doesn’t improve some things. I really miss the days of being a DINK (double-income no-kids) kind of family. Hopefully with this program we can have the room to do more fun things guilt free- because we’ll be in the black.

Puppet End to End. Well, more like Beginning to Beginning.

I’ve been experimenting a little more with setting up Puppet. So far, I’ve successfully been able to get Puppet up and going – and now, I’m left with the feeling OK, that was neat I guess. Now what? There’s an ocean of possibilities when it comes to Puppet and its integration points with Azure – infrastructure as code to configuration management. I’m just scratching the surface, and I’m not pretending that any of the below is anything but the fumblings of a complete newbie. Still, I wanted to share with you my list of steps in preparing Puppet on Azure – as the first in what hopefully will be a series as I use Puppet as an engine to drive my DevOps learnings. Hope this helps!

 

Setting Up Your First Puppet Master in Azure

  • We need to set up Azure CLI first.
    • Install (using the steps in this article) node.js from the official install site. You could do this on a VM, or right on your laptop.
    • Command prompt – Admin privilege – run npm install azure-cli –global
    • Then run command azure account download
    • Take the file and save it somewhere convenient – I saved it to c:\junk\azure.publishsettings
    • Then run azure account import {filename}
    • I ran azure config mode arm at this point too in a command prompt.
  • Then fill in azure account show to confirm you have the right account selected.

  • Now we go to VisualStudio Online – login at https://app.vssps.visualstudio.com/profile/view?mkt=en-us and go to your VSO portal.
  • On a new tab, go to the azure portal – https://manage.windowsazure.com/

  • Click New, then Compute -> Virtual Machine -> From Gallery.
  • Then, select the Puppet Labs node, and select the latest build of Puppet Enterprise. On my build, this is 3.7.2.


  • Choose a lower-case unique name of 3-15 characters. Standard Tier, Size at least A2, a username, and – choose a password over uploading an SSH key. This is obviously just for a demo.


  • then fill in your other values. Always select “create a new cloud service”, and open up three ports – 1) HTTPS (port 443), Puppet (8140), and MCollective (61613)


  • Go to a new browser window – it may take 10 minutes for this to appear and be fully provisioned/available – and access your URL. In my case, this is https://dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net . I don’t know yet what the password is, but I’m going to find out – in the next step.


  • Then, open up bitvise. (I’m really pleased with this SSH client in particular, but feel free to substitute whatever you like.)


     

  • In the prompts that follow – go ahead and save the remote hosts public key when it prompts. Use the username and password you used in originally creating the VM.
  • In the bitvise cmd prompt window that appears – don’t you just love linux? – run sudo grep ‘auth_user_email’ /etc/puppetlabs/installer/answers.install. Write down the user information it gives you. In this case it’s admin@dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net
  • Now run sudo grep ‘auth_password’ /etc/puppetlabs/installer/database_info.install


  • Then go back and check out that URL for your Puppet master box – in my case https://dhpuppetmaster.cloudapp.net/ OMG what am I looking at here? ISn’t this great?


     

Setting Up a Node

 

  • Now we’ve set up a Puppet Master – let’s set up a node. Create a VM – same as above, but this time let’s create a Windows Server 2012 from the Gallery. Remember to make the name lowercase – everything else can be default values.


  • The tricky part is the last page – here you want to select the Puppet Agent checkbox. Fill in the name of your Puppet server.


  • Then – once its done spinning up – go back to your Puppet admin window, and select Node Requests on the top right. You should see your new node’s request in the list. Approve it – and congrats! You now are all set up with a Puppet master and a node.

 

  • OK, now I have a working Puppet node and puppetmaster set of VM’s. Now what? Well, following the steps in this blog post – he had as many problems with the obtuse and overly generic Puppet documentation as I did! – I created a text file called helloworld.pp in a junk directory, copied it over to my root folder (/home/puppetadmin) using FTP, and then ran puppet apply hello_world.pp. (The contents of the .pp file are in the article link.) I’m sure I’m violating all kinds of best practices here but in the absence of better documentation – here it is.

     


     

  • Did it work though? I RDP onto the box – look at the Endpoints tab to view the dynamically changing public endpoint for RDP –

  • Anddddddd I see – nothing. Wow. So, clearly I’m missing something. It’s at this point – after a few hours of fumbling around – that I am admitting I’m like a six year old with scissors here. Time to go back to the drawing board and figure out more about how Puppet likes to work – before “learning by doing”.

     

Links Goodness

I will continue this with some more posts later. But in the meantime, here’s some helpful URL’s that may be of use to you in your DevOps quest:

 


 

DevOps and the game of Life.

Remember the old game of Life?

Pretty discouraging by the way. You work, you work, go to college / don’t go to college, pick up fellow travelers/family members – and at the end they add up your score. You either end up in a nice big house or a smaller one, and – what? Is that “winning”? Valuing things just by the money you’ve earned along the way, or the house you get with creaky knees and an enlarged prostate – well, that seems pretty empty to me.

The last time I gave a presentation on DevOps, I remember thinking how short I came up. I was talking about how certain cultures are very resistant to change. Most of the audience were died-in-the-wool developers, and had no problems jumping on the DevOps bandwagon. But they were frustrated at the lack of power they had to change the culture they were in. I remember making some noises about “keeping on trying” and the like.

I can say that I have seen even very resistant cultures change over time. And there’s been some great articles on building up a community of practice on DevOps from the ground up. So, free thinking a little, I went thru that blog post on guerilla-type subversive DevOps efforts – and combined it with the excellent writeup on some anti-patterns, and tried to make a game of it.

I was only mildly successful. See below – that’s as far as I’m getting for now. It’s a pretty lame game. Needs some work. But, there it is…

Between this and the articles I’m looking through on our new Release Management capabilities – it’s busy times here! Hope you are doing well as well.

 

Just a few thoughts before I go…

… back to bed that is. 103 degree fever and I’m finding it VERY hard to get any kind of work done.

 

On the plus side, I’m rediscovering my love of junk 80’s science fiction. Interstellar Pig and The Man Who Never Missed didn’t age too well – I remember loving those books as a teen. But Harry Harrison, you are STILL a genius. Love the Deathworld trilogy, it’s everything I could ever want. And that West of Eden series is a masterpiece. Genuinely got choked up at the end, it’s wistful and tragic with the lost potential. How he could build such a dynamic alien culture is beyond me. I miss those days and it seems like creativity like that – real craftsmanship – doesn’t exist anymore. Where are books like that anymore?

I am going through my goals for the year and what it will take to have My Best Year Ever. I’ll keep y’all posted.

And, did you know it’s incredibly easy to set up RM in the cloud with VSO? Here’s your link candy.