@SadServer at PuppetConf2015 provides a rather depressing view of the state of IT as a combination of crappy software with more crappy software to manage and monitor the crappy software. But there’s a ray of hope! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBwW2vTKVy4

I got a message today from our Red Hat account manager to let me know that Microsoft has signed Red Hat’s Certified Cloud Service Provider agreement, meaning that over time they will make available, and be available to host, Red Hat products in Azure. RHEL will become the premium Enterprise Linux offering in Azure. This is fantastic news for Red Hat Customers. Previously Azure was not a Red Hat Certified Platform.

WinOps conference videos have been released: Videos: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1OgsLk-HkEdQyhjJX_5JQ Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/WinOpsConf Future Meetups: http://www.meetup.com/WinOps/ Watch the keynote for a “state of the industry” regarding DevOps on Windows. Keynote part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlJo4BLtXyI Keynote part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQZYS5gu6CQ

Attended “Achieving agility with control in Financial Services on AWS” talk today at AWS Loft London 2015. The usual AWS slide of company logos was there for “look how many companies use AWS, so it must be safe!”. This list wasn’t tailored to Financial Services (Tinder, really?). There was a bit about Agility focusing on Continuous Integration (CI also known as automated testing) and Continuous Deployment (CD also known as automated deployment).

Update: THIS WAS 2015 AND PRE COVID… I’ve been reading about how distributed companies are operating. Companies with their servers running in the cloud don’t need a server room, or Office premises at all it seems. And there’s lots of them. Wired article about Automatic, the company behind WordPress Lots of information at this clever URL WorkingRemote.ly Article about how Buffer do distributed working The Pros and Cons of Remote Work in Ops As a worker wouldn’t you like to skip the commuting?

Terraform is a tool by Hashicorp (who do Vagrant, Packer and other ops tools). You maintain a single configuration file and it trues up your environment, creating and deleting machines, to match the configuration file. Their products are coming together into a cohesive suite. The first part describes the Terraform product. At 30 mins there’s a description of “DevOps” (that cuts through much of the BS). Basically: Developers care about:

Ahead of the WinOps conference later this month, here’s a short presentation about DevOps on any OS (and DevOps in general) by Steve Thair from consultancy The Dev Ops Guys. https://blog.dataloop.io/2015/03/31/doxlon-devops-exchange-mar-15-devops-for-windows-an-oxymoron/ http://www.meetup.com/DevOps-Exchange-London/

Quick post about how to disable User Account Control for administrators on servers. Group Policy setting: Computer Configuration > Policies -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode = Elevate withouth prompting User Account Control: Detect application installations and prompt for elevation = Disabled User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode = Disabled Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system\EnableLUA=0

The WinOps conference will take place 22 September 2015 in London. The agenda is now up at http://winops.org/. What, you though DevOps was only for Linux?

I hit a stumbling block with adding compute nodes to new HPC cluster. If you see the following errors when deploying Microsoft HPC Pack 2012 R2 when joining compute nodes to the cluster: HPC Node Manager Service unreachable and System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingException: An error occurred while processing the request on the server: System.Runtime.Remoting.RemotingException: User identity is not authorized to connect to this endpoint The solution is to add your installation credentials to the administrators group before install HPC pack on compute nodes.