2016-06 on Funky Si's Blog (Dev)

Periodic Table of DevOps

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 20:00:45 +0000

The periodic table lists all the chemical elements and groups them together based on some key properties. Today I found an article about the periodic table of DevOps .

I am not going to discuss every element but I thought I might go through some that I have heard of or used.

Github – The repository of lots of open source software. My Github can be found at https://github.com/funkysi1701
Amazon Web Services – The second most popular cloud computing provider (not sure why this isn’t number 3?)
Git – The distributed source control system that everyone uses these days.
Azure – The number one cloud provider, I have used this a lot, mostly with websites but also with some of their other features like Traffic Manager.
Bitbucket – like Github but allows private repositories. I have used this extensively for work based projects that I don’t want to be public.
Google Cloud Platform – don’t know much about this one, but no surprise that google wants a piece of the cloud computing pie.
Selenium – This is a product I want to play about with as allows front end testing with a browser.
Rackspace – Before we made the jump to Azure we made use of some Rackspace servers.
Subversion – The first source control system that I used, but been using git so long now not sure I can remember how it worked.
Visual Studio – The IDE from Microsoft that I use to write code. I am a big fan as it does everything I could want.
TeamCity – The continuous integration software that I have been using to automate my deployments.
MSBuild – This is used by Visual Studio to build your software and can also be used by your deployment scripts.
Trello – A website that allows you to create a board of ideas or things to do.
Slack – Brings all your communication together in one place. It’s real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams.
New Relic – A software analytics tool suite used by developers, ops, and software companies to understand how your applications are performing. Useful but find myself favouring Application Insights (part of Azure) more now.
Nagios – Yay nagios is on the list! My favourite server monitoring system.
Splunk – This application can be used to search, monitor and analyse all your log files to find out what is happening. Don’t currently use it but I have tried it out in the past.

What is your favourite DevOps tool? Why not leave a comment below?

Automatic Git Tagging

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 20:00:45 +0000

One of the features of git is the ability to tag a point in my change history with a tag. For a while now I have been manually tagging my code whenever I do a release, so I can easily work out what has changed by doing a diff between two tags.

Now that I am automating my release process with TeamCity I am thinking about how to manage my tags better.

TeamCity has a setting called VCS Labeling which comes in very handy.

Configuring it is fairly simple as it only has three settings.

VCS root to label: This is obviously the url to your git repository Labeling pattern: This is the text of the label to be added. Label successful builds only: Do you really want to add a tag if the build failed?

A tag needs to have a unique name, so adding a tag just called deployed won’t work. When I used to add tags manually I used the naming convention of deployedyyyymmdd. While this naming convention is possible with TeamCity I use something a bit more complex to provide more information about what has been deployed.

TeamCity provides lots of parameters that can be used in your build steps and also in the Labeling pattern box. I started off using deployed-build-%system.build.number% as my tag which just marks git with the TeamCity build number.

When I run a TeamCity deployment I don’t always use the same configuration options, I deploy locally, to a test server or to production and sometimes I just deploy the frontend or the backend. How cool would it be to include this information in the tag text?

Well the next step was to change my Labeling pattern to deployed-build-%system.build.number%-%ServerName%-%DatabaseName%-%FrontEndPath%, this adds the backend database config settings and the path the frontend was deployed to. Now when looking at git you can see commits marked with multiple tags, one for each deployment that succeeded and the tag will indicate the settings used during that deployment.

Now I will never forget to add the tag after a release as the adding of a tag is part of the deployment process, if the deployment fails the tag won’t be added. I can test my deployment to test and git will show if this has been successful, and when I deploy live this will also show up.

How do you use tags? Do you mark successful builds with a tag? Why not let me know or leave a comment below.

I’m 100 blog posts old

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 20:00:45 +0000

That’s right this is the one hundredth post that I have written on this blog.

So what have I learned in the past 100 posts?

It is easier to write a blog before you become a parent. More recently I am increasingly finding it difficult to find the time to blog. It used to be that I could write on an evening, but now James is around I often prefer to play with him, or more often stop him crawling where he shouldn’t.
I like my job. The inspiration for most of this site is my day job and as you can read, I do a wide variety of different things, but I have a lot more to learn as well.
Finding your niche is hard. 100 posts in and I am still not sure what my niche is. I started out with the broad niche of IT and what I do, I then considered something about IT and fatherhood but I don’t think that topic is really me. My current thinking is maybe DevOps especially as my role these days fits squarely between Development and Operations.
Its time for a refresh. I have been meaning to change the theme of this site for some time and I feel after 100 posts now is as good as time as any. I want to emphasise my skills and what I am learning and increase the emphasis on DevOps, which I think will be my niche.
Watching visitor numbers is addictive. Every day I look at how many people have looked at my blog, but I have yet to see a pattern between what I write and how many reads I get. Is my writing getting better? I don’t know. Are more people reading? Probably not. Will I keep going? Yes

So what is next?

Hopefully a refreshed look in the next few months. Hopefully regular posts. If there is something you want to see on here drop me a message via any of the social media links or put a comment below.

What is my favourite post?

Maybe User Groups and F# which proved very popular and got me to start going to user groups something I still enjoy today. I also like Coding Myself Into A Corner which got me to start thinking more if I was giving myself future problems. But there are many others I like such as James and Becoming a father