Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Working in an opensource dev ops world



Over the last few years, I have been working in more of a devops world and I thought it was about time I wrote about some of my experiences and more to the point, how I did it some of the projects I have been working on! I have been working in the public cloud space and there is no doubt that this has opened my imagination with whats possible using open source software. It has been a complete eye opener in terms of learning about whats rocks in the open source world. A few years back I was working for corporate companies where it was windows windows windows, and to be fair Microsoft do have some fantastic products. Exchange for example is key to corporates.. and when I say key, like a orange is to orange juice - without it, corporates can't live. There are other great products - active directory - often overlooked as 'it just works' but it is a fantastic product. SQL server, one of my favourites and really great when you include SSIS and SSRS as part of your DB solution. So when I turned my back on the corporate world and dived in to opensource, I was always trying to find the equivilent solution and I must admit, they are there with a bit of skill fine tuning/. To list a few, here are some of the key products I have been working with:

1 - XenServer

2 - Mysql

3 - Jasper reports server

4 - Jenkins

5 - Python and Django

6 - Cloudstack

7 - Puppet

8 - CentOS

The list can go on, but there is enough to blog about. The main difference with open source versus the windows world is it is definitely more code orientated. Now I was VB VB VB in my windows world and learning python was one of the best tings I have done. I am not going to say I am a python expert by any chance, but I have written a few scripts now and can achieve what I need to do.

So all in all it a good world in open source. It is amazing how one can do quite a bit so I will add to this blog, and don'y worry for those reading on, it will be focused purely on technical solutions as blogs of words doesn't generally help those look for solutions.

To the devops world!