DevOps Musings

Stop Trying to Use Crappy Libraries

Using a great gem called 'Savon' you can avoid all the garbage of trying to download and install F5's gem file to use their SOAP API.

Here are several examples of how to connect, make operation calls and some expected results along with what the valid SOAP formation should look like.

Get the GIST here.

I also highly recommend the RailsCast on Savon for a great primer and Savon's documentation is awesome too.

As in the RailsCast I would definitely download SOAPUI to start downloading and messing with the WSDL.

After a few months of continually not integrating our Load Balancers with better commands than SSH, I've found this is one of those scenarios where it's better not to use a vendor provided (hardly updated) library.

Hope this helps someone out there!

Haven't been keeping up to date on my writing but it has been a busy month!

So after much discussion I've found the company I work at offers a "travel the world" program. I've been wanting to travel and work for many years and perhaps now I have a way to do this.

If I can get all my crap together I will definitely be interested in Devops(ing) it up all around the world.

Anyone in Northern Europe wants to get together for coffee or beers let me know!

Fun Stuff

Fun stuff I've been working - our deployment / PaaS software (DeepThought) - has gotten some nice AutoScaling Integration and some nice visual state machine stuff. See images below --

That took a lot of refactoring of the original design but it fit in nicely with single table inheritance and a nice finite-state-machine gem called state_machine.

After much searching and toiling I've gotten one example to work - hopefully if I can get more keywords in here I can help others with this issue.

Here's the configuration that worked for me:

<Resource name="mail/MailSession" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session" mail.debug="true" mail.transport.protocol="smtp" mail.smtp.host="email-smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com" mail.smtp.auth="true" mail.smtp.port="587" mail.smtp.starttls.enable="true" mail.user="--USER--" mail.password="--PASSWORD--" username="--USER--" password="--PASSWORD--" />

Make sure you verify your domain or email you're sending from.

Starting to reflect on what the previous week brought me and how I handled it. Last week we had a private line between datacenters go down and it was interesting the fail scenario we experienced due to the outage. All data layer systems chugged along fine but our internal communications for token processing found an interesting geographic trigger when the network connection is inconsistent.

Things I Learned

Don't settle on one monitoring system to tell you what's going on. NewRelic's time to catch up with the error rate fucked me over a bit. I should have also checked our Splunk live logs.

Always have a way to access the Datacenter even without IT's involvement. We were left hanging while a guy drove somewhere to check things :[

Ask developers "what would happen if"

And the biggest thing I learned last week was always make sure you have an alternate path. The Internet Sucks, you'd think working at an ISP for 6 years would have taught me that networks fail.

Today is the day I start to blog and share my learning and side research. Everything that sparks my interest will in one way or another end up here.

The reason I posted this quote is because all too often I hear, “if you’re not failing, you’re not trying.” This blog will be pushing me out of my comfort zone with technical writing and hobby musings / sharing.

We’ll see how it goes :)