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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Monthly Archives: March 2015

My Praise for Cloud Patterns Book

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, General, Technology

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Tags

book, Cloud, Patterns, servicetech, ServiceTech Press, Thomas Erl

This book continues the very high standard we have come to expect from ServiceTech Press. The book provides well explained vendor agnostic patterns to the challenges of providing or using cloud solutions from PaaS to SaaS. The book is not only a great patterns reference, but also a worth reading from cover to cover as the patterns are thought provoking, drawing out points that you should consider and ask of a potential vendor if you’re adopting a cloud solution.

Phil Wilkins, Enterprise Integration Architect

 

 

 

 

 

Useful Links:

  • http://www.cloudpatterns.org/ 
  • http://servicetechbooks.com/cloudpatterns

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Ansible Book Review Part 4

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, automation, AWS, book, Chef, configuration, deployment, DigitalOcean, Docker, Hadoop, Packt, Packt Publishing, Puppet, Puppet Labs, review

This the final part of the detailed look at Packt book, Learning Ansible. As the book says in the opening to chapter 6 we’re into the back straight, into the final mile. The first of  two final  chapters look at provisioning of platforms on Amazon AWS, DigitalOcean and the use of the very hip and cool Docker plus updating your inventory of systems given that we have dynamically introduced new ones.  The approach is illustrated by not only instantiating servers but delivering a configured Hadoop cluster. As with everything else we’ve seen in Ansible there isn’t a standardised approach to all IaaS platforms as that restricts you the lowest common denominator which is contrary to Ansible goals described early on. But deploying the Hadoop elements on the two cloud IaaS providers is common.  Although the chapter is pretty short, I did have to read through this more carefully, as the book leverages a lot of demonstrated features from previous chapters (configuration arrays etc) which meant seeing the key element of the interaction with AWS was harder. It does mean if you tried diving into this chapter straight away, although not impossible does require a bit more investment from the reader to see all the value points. That said it is great to see through the use of the various features how easy to setup the provisioning in the cloud is, and the inventory update. Perhaps the win would have been to just so the simple provision and then the clever approach.

Chapter 7 focuses on Deployment. When I read this, I was a little nonplussed, hadn’t we been reading about this in the previous 6 chapters. But when you look at the definition provided:

“To position (troops) in readiness for combat, as along a front or line.”
Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing. 

You can start to see the true target of what we’re really thinking about, which is the process of going from software build to production readiness. So having  gone through the software packaging activities you need to orchestrate the deployment across potentially multiple servers across a server farm. This orchestration piece is really just pulling together everything that has been explained before but also share some Ansible best practise. Then finally an examination of the Ansible approach for the nodes to pull deployments and updates.

The final piece of the book is an Appendix which looks at the work to bring Ansible to the Windows platform, Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Tower.  Ansible Galaxy is a repository of roles build by the Ansible community. Ansible Tower provides a web front end to the Ansible server. The Tower product is the commercial side of the Ansible company – and effectively sales here fund the full time Ansible development effort.

So to summarise …

The Learning Ansible book explains from first principles to the very rich capabilities of building packaging software, instantiating cloud servers or containers through to configuring systems and deploying applications into new environments; and then capturing instantiated system details into the Ansible inventory. How Ansible compares with the more established solutions in this space in the form of Puppet and Chef is discussed, and the pros and cons of the different tools. All the way through, the books has been written in an easy engaging manner. You might even say wonderfully written. The examples are very good with the possible exception of 2 cases (just merely good in my opinion), the examples are supported with very clear explanations that demonstrate the power of the Ansible product. Even if you choose not to use Ansible, this book does an excellent job of showing the value of not resorting to the ‘black art’ of system build and configuration and suggesting good ways to realising automation of this kind of activity, in many place undoubtedly thought provoking

Prior Review Parts:

  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3

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Pheonix servers

14 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General

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“The end result is that, while designing your infrastructure, you want to make sure that you can bring up and bring down machines on demand and not allow certain machines to assume mammoth importance.”

Excerpt From: “Learning Ansible.” Packt Publishing. iBooks. 

This material may be protected by copyright.

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New eBook offer from Oracle Press

12 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Oracle, Oracle Press

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books, database, ebook, Oracle, Oracle Press, Query, tuning

Oracle Press are offering the Quick Start Guide to Oracle Query Tuning for free at the moment – register for the book at http://books.mcgraw-hill.com/ebookdownloads/solarwinds/ 

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Learning Ansible Review Part 3

08 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Book Reviews, Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ansible, book, ebook, error, learning, Packt, publishing, python, reporting, review, rollback

Chapters 4 & 5 of Packt’s Learning Ansible continue to build out strategies needed for enterprise class deployment and configuration management, for example error handling, rollback and reporting in chapter 4.  As chapter, the amount of new Ansible capabilities being introduced is not as substantive as prior chapters, and emphasis is more only what could be described as best practise. For example creating Playbooks that have the means to be invoked to re-establish a prior state if the the execution of the current playbook was to throw up an error.  The callback explanation does need a bit more understanding of how Python works as implementing a callback involves a little bit of Python coding, but the points into which you can hook actions is very rich.

From knowing how to trap callbacks it becomes possible to initiate notifications when events occur in playbooks which is where this chapter moves onto with monitoring and alerting. This really focuses on has my playbook executed as expected and reporting back through means such as email, nagios and graphite.  The examples with email and nagios miss a trick, although the text says you can incorporate output from tasks – it isn’t illustrated; yet if something falters you’d want to see the task output.

Chapter 5 goes into how you might write your own custom modules and test them. Ansible will support any language that is available in your target environment, although Python is the recommended language given its general availability and is the language used to write Ansible, and Ansible modules can be leveraged to shorten the effort in creating custom modules. The chapter then walks through examples using Python, Bash shell scripting and Ruby. A lot of the work appears to be centred on extracting the appropriate parameters to allow the module to run with. The final part of the chapter looks at testing with the Python Nose library.

Solid chapters, and perhaps a little shorter than the first few, but importantly continuing to be well written although perhaps a couple of small missed opportunities to be great chapters.

Prior chapter reviews:

  • Learning Ansible Part 2
  • Learning Ansible Part 1

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Cloud Design Patterns

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Technology

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Cloud, Cloud Design Patterns, CSA, design patterns, forthcoming book, Oracle, Patterns, Prentice Hall, Thomas Erl

The book reviewing opportunities are coming thick & fast. In addition to currently providing review feedback on a forthcoming book on Apache Camel to be published by Packt (previous blog entry),  I’ve been fortunate to get the opportunity to review another book in development as part of the Thomas Erl Technical Series, this time on Cloud Design Patterns.  From what I’ve seen before, the books is unsurprisingly going to have a similar style to the other patterns books in the series.  It is also living upto the same high standard of insight.  You can see some information from the website that will be supporting the book at http://www.cloudpatterns.org/ and the from the publisher at http://servicetechbooks.com/cloudpatterns.

In looking at some background to one of the patterns, it was also interesting to note that despite Oracle now having focused a lot of its massive resources at cloud offerings, has no apparent involvement with the Cloud Security Alliance, even though most of the other businesses that Oracle could consider to be potential competitors or are premier partners are associated with it (CSA Corporate Membership).

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Oracle Press – Free EBooks

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ebook, free, Oracle, Oracle Press, publications, UKOCN

So Oracle Press have been celebrating 20 years of publications.  As part of that celebration they have over the year offered a number of eBooks for free.  The UKOCN site have pulled a list of these free books together along with relevant links for request the ebooks – go checkout http://www.ukocn.com/article/oracle-press-free-copies – if this link doesn’t work (UKOCN maybe preventing deep links) then go to http://www.ukocn.com/ and visit articles, and you should see an article called “ORACLE PRESS FREE COPIES!”. at the time of writing this post this is on the homepage of listed articles.

“

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