17 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in Books
05 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Books, Technology
I was going to publish the first part of my review of the Packt book Learning Ansible after every couple of chapters, but the preface and 1st chapter are pretty substantive not mention starts to address some of my questions regarding Ansible compared to Puppet and Chef.
So the first thing that is sticking is that the author’s style is a very easy to read flowing style. It means that your entire focus is on the content, and you don’t feel like you’re being lectured.
The preface is carries a lot of really valuable content setting the context and capabilities into which Ansible is working. It openly identifies the other leading products covering the different aspects in which someone interested in the space would want to know about or may already understand. So the following areas are called out:
Chapter 1 pretty much faces into the question of differentiating Ansible from Chef and Puppet. The key being that Ansible is not a master and distributed client model which Puppet and Chef offer (although both offer a Masterless models which just distribute the client). What is missing from this initial conversation is that consideration of security. In a master and client model security can be stronger because even if you compromise the master, you still have an intermediary in the agent to protect against malicious actions. Where as breaching the Ansible node means you will have obtained SSH access to all the nodes available for management as this is how Ansible interacts with the nodes it is managing.
Despite this, the arguments are simply laid out, particularly the other significant difference is that a lot of the client-agent approaches mean they offer an abstraction of the types of activities you might want for example install an application which are abstracted from the likes of msi, yum, Red Hat Network and so on. The argument for not having this is that to provide abstraction you potentially end up dropping to the lowest common denominator (unless the tool implements capabilities not naturally available on the platform). A very fair and valid argument. It is also likely in an enterprise environment you’re probably using a small set of different types of environment and potentially only type type of environment for different solutions I.e. Your website is unlikely to be hosted by servers running Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora.
The first chapter takes you through a series of simple examples derived from a classic variant of IT’s classic Hello World solution. This does make for a sizeable first chapter (about 1/5th of the book) but does introduce all the core principles, ideas and capabilities that are embodied and provided by Ansible. If you want to know whether Ansible is likely to meet what you want to do then reading just this chapter will probably give you a view on whether you’re likely to be able to do what you want.
Although the book makes references to the support of Windows, but this is still in Alpha phase (Ansible Windows is Coming).This does mean that the examples are Linux only. Additionally it appears from the ansible site (the book doesn’t provide any indication of this) the central Ansible node(s) will still have to be Linux. The book in this case appears to trying to future proof itself. We hope that the author will provide Windows equivalent downloadable demos.
The long and short of it, a great start to a book.
27 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in Books
Packt Publishing have given me the opportunity to review their book on Learning Ansible – an IT environment/apps/deployment automation framework. Should be interesting to see how Ansible compares to the big names of Chef and Puppet. Flicking through the book, there appear to be plenty of examples and illustrations using common open source tools such as MySQL and Apache.
We’ll blog as we go, so should have a post every few chapters, so watch this space.
Things are going to be busy as I am also technically reviewing another Camel Book for Packt as well.
08 Monday Dec 2014
Posted in Books, Technology
Having been a little inactive on the book reviewing front with Packt in the last couple of months. They have been working on a new Camel book – in addition to the excellent Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook and several smaller Instant books (Instant Apache Camel Message Routing, Instant Apache Camel Messaging System) and asked me to again prepublication review.
Does Packt need another Camel book? Maybe, this new volume from what I have reviewed so far is focusing on custom development and certainly starts with the real Camel development basics. So feels like it is more targeted to a complete newbie to Camel. Several chapters in and the book hasn’t faced into how Camel supports Enterprise Integration Patterns in a deep manner – although that may yet come. Watch this space as I’ll post on how the book is likely to shape up.
12 Wednesday Nov 2014
Posted in Books, General, Technology
My copy of the Next Generation SOA on the Service Tech Press /Prentice Hall arrived today. This is first Prentice Hall book I have contributed to as a pre publication reviewer. It is always nice to see a recognition in the book, particularly when the draft of the book is of such a high standing your feedback is more helping finesse things.
Next Generation SOA
I have previously blogged that this is a book I would highly recommend, it isn’t a vast heavyweight text, but provides a great broad view of SOA in the current IT landscape. If you’re not adverse to eBooks you might consider getting the ebook version as the diagrams look far better in colour than in the grayscale of the print edition.
Next Generation SOA
14 Sunday Sep 2014
I recently contributed to the prepublication review of the Next Generation SOA book. Aside from offering feedback, I also provided some praise for the book which has been published at servicetechbooks.com/nextgen and quoted below …
“This is the perfect book for anyone who wants to refresh, or get a handle on the foundations of SOA without delving into the deep technical details & implementation specifics. By working from the principles, the book shows how the SOA concepts and goals have matured, influenced and grown with technologies such as Master Data, Virtualization and Cloud. The book points to other volumes in the series for the depth of detail and technicalities, allowing you to get the broad picture view and without any vendor colouration.”
– Phil Wilkins, Enterprise Integration Architect
I would actively recommend the book to anyone who has an IT leadership role.
09 Tuesday Sep 2014
Posted in Books, General, Technology
Tags
book, EasticSearch, Foreman, Kibana, Logstash, mCollective, Packt, Pulp, Puppet, review, Ruby, Splunk, Thomas Uphill, YAML
Packt’s Mastering Puppet
kicks off with substantial first chapter on how to setup Puppet in a manner that can then scale. The core of this is driven by an explanation of the constituent parts of a Puppet solution and where the workload is. In terms of execution this is as much about understanding the configuration of things like Apache, Passenger and Ningx as it is Puppet. As part of the explanation there are indicative numbers in terms of supportable scale which reflects the knowledge of the product.
Looking at configuration distribution for headless deployments with Git is a solid well considered piece and the writing suggests considers all the needs of a solid deployment of a production quality solution such as access control, whilst supporting collaborative working etc. it would be interesting to have seen how that would have stacked against capabilities such as Zookeeper.
As we move through the chapters the books continues with more advanced themes such as using Hiera as a object hierarchical framework for managing configuration and on into leveraging Puppet forge and various Git repositories (and the challenges when linking to git repositories of the latest code vs a release). With the repositories we can draw in additional tooling and how to incorporate these capabilities into a deployment. This includes looking at several modules that practical experience from the author would recommend.
By chapter 6 we’re into writing our own custom modules and facts and deploying them. So you can do things such as create modules to manage your custom solutions.
The next natural step is to look at the reporting aspects of Puppet, orchestration through marionette collective (mCollective). Obviously to report you need to gather the activity information, so the book touches on the out of the box (OOTB) approach and moves onto the idea of using IRC; presentation via Foreman and Puppet Dashboard. Finally then with a reporting view, the next step is to dynamically query the nodes in Puppet environment which uses mcollective to communicate back & forth with the nodes.
So now we have a dynamically configurable set of Nodes, which can report and have dynamic querying against the nodes. Final chapters cover the use of things like PuppetDB, roles & profiles and developing and debugging your puppet environment.
Reading the book, I get the feeling that a fair grasp of Linux system administration would help (i.e. a bit more than the average developer). There are a few useful touches that I think could have been included, such as external references such as man pages for RPM or site for the Pulp tool mentioned. But, as criticisms go, this as much me being too lazy to Google. The only other refinement would be inclusion of some diagrams to support the words. As they say a picture can tell a 1000 words, even if this was to just show the hierarchy or directory structures involved.
Compared to the recently reviewed Puppet Reporting book, this book isn’t for someone starting out with Puppet (but the Packt site says as much). You atleast need to have got some basic understanding or practical exposure to Puppet, and exposure to a development environment is an added bonus. So if you’re setting out with Puppet you might consider starting with the Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide (Amazon) or Instant Puppet 3 Starter (Amazon). Having got those under your belt, try this book to to really develop the use of Puppet configuration and deployment. When it comes to reporting I’d look at this book along with reporting book (reviewed here). This book feels like more options are on offer, but Puppet Reporting is a lot richer (but you’d expect that given the different book emphasis).
In summary – good solid book, full of practical experience and ideas. But don’t try to use this as a jumpstart to Puppet.
Below are a few links I thought might be helpful as they aren’t in the book:
21 Thursday Aug 2014
Posted in Books, General, Technology
So having been a little quiet on the book review side of things, having had a bit of time away with the family Packt have asked me to take a look at their book Mastering Puppet (Packt site, Amazon); and excitingly I have been talking with people at Architura (the people behind the Thomas ERL SOA books published by Prentice Hall (Amazon)) and the architecture resources such as SOA Patterns with the possibility of contributing to the pre-publication reviewing of a new book in the series in the next month or so – should be interesting.
Talking of pre-publication reviews Applied SOA Patterns on the Oracle Platform which I contributed reviews to is now publisher on the Packt Site and Amazon.
18 Friday Jul 2014
Posted in Books, General, Technology
Tags
book, Bootstrap, Design, Designmodo, HTML, Packt, review, skeuomorphic, UI, website
I always find when looking at book if I encounter early in the book comments such as “…eventually I found out that design is not about the answers, it’s about asking the right questions …” as Antonio Pratas does in the Acknowledgement of Creating Flat Design Websites that the book feels like I can trust the author as this sort of thing is both an honest observation and one that reflects some more considered thinking. The book beards this point out. For example rather than pitching the technology or approach as a tool for all things as many IT books have habit if doing, even in the first couple of chapters we are clearly informed that flat design isn’t necessarily correct approach in all cases and examples are given to illustrate the point.
The opening chapter explains the ideas of flat design vs skeuomorphic, and a brief history of the design approaches and “flat’s” ruse in popularity. Even providing an incredibly simple illustration that doesn’t demand that you be a graphic artist to achieve to show the differences and how you might move from skeuomorphic to flat.
The following chapters look at the consideration for usability, referencing Jakob Neilsen’s work (and if design piques your interest I’d highly recommend the work of Neilsen’s partner at NN/g – Don Norman with writing such as the Design of Everyday Things). The only criticism I might make here is with UI design, and specifically web there are legal (in the UK this cones presently as part if disability discrimination) and industry standards (particularly W3C’s WCAG standard/guidelines) aren’t really mentioned. But if you start digging into good usability material you will encounter these aspects.
From this point when are then guided through a design approach with plenty of recommendations on how to approach the design phase (from the basics of considering your target audience onwards). It is only chapter 5 that really get stuck into web tech with HTML and the Designmodo framework built on Twitter’s Bootstrap and chapter 6 covers building your own flat UI framework. So this book maybe pitched at web app development, but actually the bulk of the books content holds true whether you’re working on web solutions, thick apps for the desktop or the mobile variety as it embodies the principles if good interface design.
Not only does it successfully talk about good design it bridges the gap between techies and graphic artists without the sense it is trying to address either skills base. No mean feat.
Rather than stealing the book’s wealth of useful resources, I’ll point you at links relevant the book and it’s author. From there you’ll find a cast array of helpful resources. The references :
27 Friday Jun 2014
Posted in Books, General, Technology
Tags
book, Michael Duffy, monitoring, Packt, packtpub, Puppet, reporting, review, Ruby
So the Packt book (Puppet Reporting and Monitoring) focuses down on a couple of aspects of the Puppet Toolset, as a result this is a relatively short book with only a couple hundred pages. As an enterprise architect I am no expert Puppet practitioner, my knowledge of Ruby is high level (part of the reason I reviewed this book is I wanted to better understand the art of the possible in these areas). But despite this the book does an exceptionally good job defining a context and then explaining and showing what could be done, down to code examples. In doing so, the author Michael Duffy introduces a number of open source libraries that can be leveraged to provide dashboard views, presentation of report content whilst maximising the leveraging of the Puppet ecosystem such as the Puppet DB (an abstracted database with a REST + JSON API). The book goes beyond just implementation of monitoring and reporting but also engages with considerations such as deployment. without ‘boiling the ocean’ the book provides a very good illustrations of the art of the possible and provides plenty of references to source information so working how you want to implement you own solutions.
My only criticism of the book, and it is a minor one at that is a few more diagrams to help illustrate ideas (particularly in the first chapter when discussing deployment considerations) would help get ideas across easily.
On the strength of this book, I hope that Michael considers taking on other authoring projects as this has been one of the best written technical books I’ve read in sometime.
Useful Links:
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