

Learn Chef, Puppet, configuration management, and automation - makerops
http://makerops.com
Hi, I have a 9-5 in "devops" writing puppet/chef code, and do freelancing on the side, I am putting together a site to teach entry level, or even experienced admins who don't mess with development much, a way to get through the learning curve. If you write ruby, you have probably heard of railscasts, my goal is the be the railscasts for system admins, teaching openstack/aws's APIs, how to write chef/puppet providers and recipes/manifests respectively, and how to manage things on the server platform (open source chef/puppet servers) as well.<p>On the flip side, I aim to teach devs how to roll your own systems, in a safe, scalable manner.<p>What do you guys think, any suggestions?
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bad_user
> _Makerops.com will help you or your team, decide whether puppet or chef is
> the right path for you._

The deployment for an app I have involves building EC2 machines from scratch
by means of a Fabric script, which is doing nothing more than connect to an
EC2 instance through SSH and then invoke shell commands, like installing
packages through "apt-get install", cloning the Git repo, compiling the
project and copying configuration files.

This Fabric script is invoked by a Ruby script I wrote, that's using the AWS
command-line tools under the hood, first creating an EC2 machine, then running
the Fabric script on it, then creating an AMI (image) out of that machine.

Another Ruby script I have, also using the command line AWS tools, is creating
auto-scaling groups out of prepared AMI images, properly configured, with
auto-scaling policies based on latency, attaching those auto-scaling groups to
our ELB load balancer.

This workflow of first creating an AMI image seems like overkill, however I
like _immutable_ snapshots of deployments, such that (a) we can run different
versions in parallel to test new versions on only a small percentage of
traffic and (b) in case shit happens, we can instantly revert to an older
snapshot that is known to work (and problems can happen not only when you're
breaking things in your code-base, but also when you install different
versions of software packages or with faulty system-wide configuration files,
so having a snapshot of the whole system is useful).

For me the question of _Puppet_ or _Chef_ has been _neither_. Both are way too
complicated and problematic for what I wanted to do. I'm a developer and I
solved my deployment needs by writing a bunch of scripts.

~~~
makerops
This is an awesome point, and I need to change the copy; the site won't teach
just puppet/chef, even though that is my specialty, there is a lot of room
between going full fledged with a config stack, and writing some thing in
between. It will be down the road, but these topics are something, I'll also
be pursuing. Especially how to take a vagrant instance to the cloud, that is a
workflow I really like.

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alanbyrne
As a recent Puppet/Chef advocate I think this is a great idea. I've recently
gone to a lot of DevOps conferences/meetups in the London area and they are
becoming quite popular.

I am sure a similar thing is happening where you are based and it might be
worth you going along to give talks and sharing your experience. It will help
your site get exposure to the right audience if you respectfully mention it at
the beginning or end of your talk.

Some constructive points: The copy on your site could use a tweak. There are a
lot of unnecessary commas and strange grammar usage.

The mouse-over nav on your blog makes my eyes bleed, especially the colour of
the tag line.

Consider putting your blog under your main subdomain
(<http://www.makerops.com/blog>) rather than a separate sub-domain
(<http://blog.makerops.com>). We did this recently and it dramatically
improved our SEO as Google started using the content on our blog to rank our
whole site.

Edit: Fixing my own grammar!

~~~
makerops
Thanks for the input, first thing on the agenda after mastering producing
screen casts, is to find a good copywriter, and designer for the launch. If
anyone is looking for some freelance work in these areas, feel free to get in
touch anthony(at)makerops.com

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jjsz
What about other tools like: Open Source PaaSs, Open Virtual Machine Formats,
OpenShift, OpenStack, Cloudify, CloudFoundry, Hyper V, KVM, Xen (XCP), Virtual
Box, AMI, LXC, OpenVZ, GlusterFS, Ceph, OpenStack Object Storage (SWIFT),
Sheepdog, OpenFiler, Provisioning and Monitoring tools, like you said
Orchestration/Automation & Configuration Management tools, Cobbler, Spacewalk,
Kickstart, others like Cfengine, Cacti/RRDTool, Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss,
Capistrano, RunDeck, Func, MCollective, and others. Then probably choices
between choosing the OS: Debian, Fedora, maybe Arch Linux for those that like
that.

These, and probably others that I don't know, are the choices that someone,
who believes in not pursuing in anything proprietary, that also wants to learn
to build an OpenSource IaaS, or PaaS stack for their product- are researching
into but cannot find a straightforward guide. Advocating working with OSS, and
teaching people how to use OSS tools will lead to more jobs, so keep at it. I
subscribed to your email list...

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rubinelli
It looks like you are double-decoding: your signup form turned a plus sign in
my email into a space and then complained that it was invalid. And that has to
be the blandest "thank you" page I've ever seen.

I think that's a niche that needs to be filled. We don't have half as many
devops as we need right now, partly because many companies haven't even
realized they need this position in the team, but also because it's so hard to
train people.

~~~
makerops
Thanks for the tips, I'm not the best marketer/designer etc. I forgot to dig
in to the + in the emails, Ill check that out when I get a chance.

I agree there is a niche that needs to be filled, especially from a devs
perspective, after reading about the startup that lost almost everything due
to no backup, it re-affirmed my belief that even more so from a devs
perspective, a good railscasts-like learning site will hopefully meet a need.

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zlbrooks
This seems to be an extremely needed tutorial. makerops, do you have an ETA on
when the lessons will begin? I am very excited for the premiere.

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angersock
Minor thing: would you mind having the logos for Chef, Puppet, etc. actually
link to those sites? Seems kind of mean not to.

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rubinelli
Let me play devil's advocate: This is a landing page. The _very last thing_
you want in a landing page is to send your visitor to another site. They have
enough traffic as it is; they don't need the OP's.

~~~
angersock
This site offers (if I read it correctly, which I may not have) training on
these devops tools and platforms, right?

Being able to go and look at those sites to learn what the tools are and why I
might need training would be useful--seeing the Chef docs might make me
appreciate this service even more.

~~~
makerops
I agree with you, I should have linked to them; when I get a chance I'll do
so; it was one of those things that just didn't occur to me.

