With full-time remote work, internet outages transform from a nuisance to a real problem Prior to the pandemic, “working hours” were typically considered fair game by internet service providers to schedule necessary system maintenance. It’s unrealistic to expect perfect uptime from any service provider — as the saying goes: Schedule maintenance on your equipment before your equipment schedules it for you!

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 Value Proposition that comes…

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. …

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 avoid automation either. Here’s an example workflow: Easy, right? There are a few issues with simply coding against…

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 on…

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 computer automatically Easy batch entry …

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 Delayed / Failed IP discovery, IP allocation failures on VLAN trunked port-groups, even within…

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. …

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…