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The challenge with build automation is too much convenience Think about it. If it's easy to compose and deploy workloads, it's also easy to develop sprawl, and a good system designer would have methods in place to mitigate that. In a previous post I covered how to deploy vSphere VMs with Ansible and the Automation …
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It's difficult to start a new software project Documentation Depending on how a software project starts, it can either be the easiest or the hardest aspect of a new project. Documentation suffers from a similar issue, so a good place to get things moving would be to simplify the basics of repository management. Here's …
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Patience is tough when deploying automated code; Here's why it is important Reliability-centric infrastructure engineers need to focus on careful, procedural, validated workflows; the systems we're responsible are simply too important to casually "toss" infrastructure requests at a common API gateway. We …
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Python's Virtual Environments Feature presents a unique opportunity with CI/CD tooling - where users congregate to publish and execute code of their own devising. Developers might use different versions of the same package (creating dependency conflicts), or they might simply need a newer version of a package than is …
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Problem Inventory - Mellanox Driver Update on ESXi 8.0u1 causing network virtualization issues After installing ESXi 8.0 Update 1, some issues start to appear with affected nmlx5_core adapters: Delayed / Failed IP discovery on VLAN-backed segments, even within the same host. Once in the ARP cache, no issues persist …
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API Interactions are designed to be easy Believe it or not, the IT infrastructure industry is trying to make things easier by building API access out. Programmatic interfaces are a new mental model competing for brain-space with GUI and CLI implementations; we need to play to its strengths: Parsing output from a …
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Let's be honest, most IT engineers are autodidacts out of necessity. Our industry isn't mature compared to most of the professions that exist today. Computer Science was first offered as a degree in 1962 in the US, and Network Science is flatly ancient, but generalized IT infrastructure support only became a schooled …
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Note: This post integrates several automation tools at once. My objective is to provide some well-documented, concrete examples of executable Ansible Playbooks, D2 Diagrams, and best practice to illustrate ways to make good documentation easy. Note: All code examples in this blog post are structured in a format to be …
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Let's do something a bit more stereotypical when we talk about IT diagramming - building Network Diagrams with D2. D2's OSS layout engines (Dagre, ELK) are both centered around hierarchical layouts, which was a bit part of why we needed to hack D2 to get vSphere diagrams to draw. Here, it quickly becomes our best …
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In a previous post we tested methods to illustrate documentation as-code with Terrastruct's D2 language. Documentation is good for infrastructure engineers in a variety of scenarios practically speaking, but we often forget the value of building consumer confidence. This may vary based on culture! My experiences are …
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