csuttles (⌐■_■)

Memento Mori

I posted a note a while ago with some great book recommendations I wanted to share. It’s been long enough that I wanted to share an update on a few things I have read or listened to that I believe are worth your consideration. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance I found this book through a TED talk. Angela Duckworth spent a lot of time researching the subject matter of this book, and her passion for the topic really comes through in the writing.

Kent's List A while ago I met with Kent Beck. I had recently taken a class from him, and I knew that he was very skilled in areas where I wished to improve; I wanted to improve my abilities to influence, my communication skills, and my leadership within my organization. We only met for half an hour, but I found the time incredibly enjoyable, useful and informative, and I am very grateful that Kent was gracious enough to spend his time with me, even though we were basically strangers at the time.

I've exceeded the AWS free tier, and happened upon a post from a friend that leads to an easy $50 AWS credit. Introducing the AWS Codestar Challenge. Codestar follows the pricing model of CloudForms and Elastic Beanstalk. It's free, but the resources created by CodeStar follow their respective pricing models. CodeStar brings together a bunch of AWS services to form an incredibly easy to use CI/CD pipeline. I was able to deploy a CI/CD pipeline for a Lambda based Python app in minutes, including setting up my access.

Automate Everything It's important to automate all the things you can to make your workflow efficient and error free. It's easy to miss a step in a runbook or let a typo ruin your testing. Enter Rally I think best way to test changes is via CI/CD, and Rally is the tool that's used for gating changes to OpenStack in OpenStack's Zuul. Even if you are not commiting code to OpenStack, Rally can help you validate changes to your environment.

There's a lot of posts on this already: https://www.openstack.org/news/view/340/openstack-pike-delivers-composable-infrastructure-services-and-improved-lifecycle-management https://www.mirantis.com/blog/53-things-to-look-for-in-openstack-pike/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/openstack_pike_release_emphasises_microservices_and_scale/ Here's what I'm excited about in this release. Python3 There are a lot of good things in the Pike release, but I am very excited to see the move to Python3.5. I stopped writing Python2.x a while ago, after reading about async in Dave Beazley's excellent Python column in :login;. I'm fortunate to work in a place that really embraces Python's new features, and fully supports Python3, so this change is huge for me, because I don't have to write Python2 anymore at all.

One More Today I crushed the AWS Certified Developer – Associate. There's a lot of overlap between this exam and the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, so I decided to make the most of my recent study efforts and go for a second AWS certification. Preparation I went through a lot of the same materials I used for the exam I passed last week. I used the course from ACloudGuru on Udemy that covers this test, and I spent more time working on DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, and SNS.

Pip won't do it I recently installed OpenStack using Kolla into a single node at home for testing the latest beta of the Pike release. When I decided to install python-openstackclient on my Mac, I ran into some problems. I ran sudo pip install python-openstackclient and things looked like they were working normally, until a wild traceback appears: Installing collected packages: pbr, monotonic, iso8601, netifaces, netaddr, pyparsing, Babel, oslo.i18n, wrapt, debtcollector, oslo.

Why? I'm going to break away from my usual focus here, and talk about my experience studying for and achiving the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate. I chose to pursue this certification for a few reasons: There's a lot of overlapping concepts between OpenStack and AWS AWS is the leader of the pack in public clouds by a very wide margin The last reason is a little long for a bullet point.

What happened? In an OpenStack instance with a single controller, using Galera and RabbitMQ for clustered database and message queue, the controller failed. I still had the message queue and database on the other nodes, but thanks to a looming timeline, pressure from management, and my own mistakes, I ended up with a SD card backing some key logical volumes. The SD card died, and thus, I am rebuilding the controller from nothing.

Docs, Pitfalls, and First Steps The Kolla OpenStack project is focused on deploying OpenStack in containers. There's a good quickstart guide, but like most things OpenStack, you'll need to dig a little deeper if you want to be successful. You can deploy an all-in-one, or multinode instance of OpenStack with Kolla; the latter requires a local Docker registry, so even for an all-in-one deployment, I chose to create a local registry, so that I might be better prepared when the time came to move to multinode.