TFS & GO & Chef, oh my: Part 12 - Conclusion, and lessons learned


Well, the presentation went over really well, so this project is now a real thing.  I'll probably post a follow-up once the pilot is in place that will highlight the questions that needed answering before it could go ahead.

If you're looking at having to go this route, some questions to consider:

  1. Why are YOU looking at solving this problem?  If it's just you, either you or everyone is doing it wrong.
  2. Is there a cross-dept team linking the project together?  Why not?
  3. What is 'DevOps' to you?  It should mean 'making things flow better'.
  4. (realizing the irony of this) Have you already picked out tools?  If so, you're doing it wrong.
  5. Do you understand exactly what you're trying to accomplish?  I mean, really?  You sure?

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.  I know these posts have been incoherent at times.

Lessons learned

  • Technical: Using Go & Go agents to remote around means you're always kinda wondering what user you are, and why such and such doesn't work - truly highlights how little you grasp of authentication (or how well Microsoft has abstracted that process from users)
  • Technical: Chef documentation is still a work in progress
  • Technical: Missing idempotency features in key cookbooks (IIS, I'm looking at you!)
  • Technical: No real simple explanation of how to layer/architect your cookbooks/recipes/roles - took hours and hours of reading to figure out (and still not certain)
  • Technical: Having to learn ssh keys, how Linux deals with sessions coming from Windows, etc.
  • Technical: (Still) learning to use Git
  • Technical: Trying to figure out the best way to deal with multi-environment configs in IIS (and the config source usage gotcha - must be inside the dir!!! i.e. cannot be a separately called dir, aka repo)
  • Technical/Process: Trying to reverse engineer MSI packages built by our company so long ago nobody knew anything about them
  • Technical: Learning to be a developer with no training (no choice here - in the coming years, Ops must learn to code)
  • Process: Trying to understand our deployment process with the mentality that it was an existing 'good' thing (when it was a very very bad thing, i.e. trying to automate a crappy process when you have the option of re-doing the process instead)
  • People: Trying to do this without (dedicated) input from all teams is bad.  In our case we had no choice, but that didn't make it good.
  • Process: Trying to do this without FULLY grasping the scope of the project was a bad idea.  Again, we had no real choice here, but yeah.  Bad.
  • People: The reason why something has never been done before is almost always NOT technical...sometimes it just takes someone who is willing to do it.
  • People: When faced with the choice of 'stay the same and decay' or 'invest time to move forward' - people rarely will rationally choose the former.  Conversely, they will rarely choose the latter voluntarily.  (just my experience)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Learning through failure - a keyboard creation journey

Image
tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues.   Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot.   Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind.   The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty.   It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues.   \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface.  Mousing changed to trackballing.  The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard.  Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros.  And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many of us work in seem to apply this as law - an
Read more

Learning Opportunities - Watching/listening list

Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours).  Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between.  Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road.  First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective.  Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'.  So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world.  Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible on
Read more

DFSR - eventid 4312 - replication just won't work

This warning isn't documented that well on the googles, so here's some google fodder: You are trying to set up replication for a DFS folder (no existing replication) Source server is 2008R2, 'branch office' server is 2012R2 (I'm moving all our infra to 2012R2) You have no issues getting replication configured You see the DFSR folders get created on the other end, but nothing stages Finally you get EventID 4312: The DFS Replication service failed to get folder information when walking the file system on a journal wrap or loss recovery due to repeated sharing violations encountered on a folder. The service cannot replicate the folder and files in that folder until the sharing violation is resolved.    Additional Information:  Folder: F:\Users$\user.name\Desktop\Random Folder Name\  Replicated Folder Root: F:\Users$  File ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}-v0  Replicated Folder Name: Users  Replicated Folder ID: 33F0449D-5E67-4DA1-99A
Read more