Kent Langley is a Senior Director at Joyent, a cloud computing provider running and offering OpenSolaris Nevada based virtual servers, called Accelerators. Not only was he kind enough to answer my questions about his role at Joyent, details about the brand new Accelerator release, and Solaris, but he even brought in Ben Rockwood to give … Continue reading Kent Langley Talks About Joyent, Their New Accelerators And Their Use of Opensolaris
Month: October 2008
Visible Ops: Continuous Improvement
In my last posts, I've introduced you to the IT Process Institute's "Visible Ops Handbook" which presents IT managers and system administrators with a clear road map of how to adopt best practices within their organizations and how to work smarter instead of harder. The first three phases outlined include change management, configuration management, and … Continue reading Visible Ops: Continuous Improvement
Critical Bugs: Blame Or Chance?
Today we noticed that a feature we released yesterday created a really nasty side effect. While experimenting with a new content structure for AUDI, which was the only one we wanted the search engine bots to crawl, we accidentally invited the bots to crawl all content for all brands. As the content of all other … Continue reading Critical Bugs: Blame Or Chance?
Presentations Without PowerPoint – Tools For Bridging The Gap
Last week, I introduced three key factors to help you connect to a non-technical audience. This week I want to introduce you to some tools and techniques for preparing your presentations. And, no, I'm not going to talk much about using PowerPoint 😉 ... Know Your Goal Every good presentation starts with a message. What … Continue reading Presentations Without PowerPoint – Tools For Bridging The Gap
Visible Ops: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Build, Build Again
By now you should have a better understanding of how your data center is setup and exactly what's all in there. You've been carefully monitoring changes to this environment and are ready to take it to the next level. The "Visible Ops Handbook" introduces the concept of "production fuses" : when things go wrong with … Continue reading Visible Ops: If At First You Don’t Succeed, Build, Build Again
Presentations Made Simple – How To Connect To A Non Technical Audience
Yesterday I came across Admin Zen by Michael "Mika" Prokop. Admin Zen is a great collection of habits you should try to master if you are responsible for running any critical systems. If you haven't read it, you should do so right now. I'll wait... Barriers For Communication I think communication is one of the … Continue reading Presentations Made Simple – How To Connect To A Non Technical Audience
Using Capistrano For Configuration Management
As I mentioned in my short comparison of Puppet vs. Capistrano, we're currently using Capistrano not only for deployment and live monitoring of our application, but also for configuration management. Using How-To Documents For Configuration Management Before getting started with Capistrano, I used to write very detailed how-to documents to make sure that I didn't … Continue reading Using Capistrano For Configuration Management
