-
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 …
Read More -
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 can't really …
Read More -
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 …
Read More -
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 …
Read More -
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 …
Read More -
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 …
Read More -
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 …
Read More -
Documentation is always important, but always takes too much time Ever had an issue where a new installation is completed, but there's just no time to update the ol' Visio diagrams? Manually composed diagrams always possess a certain art to them, but the hours per unit of documentation isn't always worthwhile …
Read More -
VMware introduced RESTful APIs with their vSphere 7.0 release train; migrating from the old MOB APIs is a welcome choice. REST clients provide a powerful tool for automating processes, but it's important to embody reliable practices when interacting with infrastructure. The neat thing about published and documented …
Read More