AWS and Synology FTP

In the last project I was involved in I needed to establish a connection between a Windows Server 2012 instance in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a physical Synology network-attached storage (NAS). The challenge was that the NAS  was located at a remote site and was behind a router. I needed to do this in […]

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Hippocratic Oath of Software: Don’t Make It Worse!

Some of you may be familiar with the Hippocratic Oath common in the medical field, often paraphrased as “Do no harm.” In a light-hearted casual conversation with a colleague the other day, I realized that we need a similar oath in the field of software development: “Don’t make it worse.”

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Java, SSL, and the unrecognized_name Error

We ran into a problem on my most recent project with a weird error popping up when installing a wildcard SSL cert into an Apache webserver. We had previously been using a self-signed cert and the Java clients attempting to connect to this site had the old self-signed cert installed into their keystores. Once the […]

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Ansible Tower: Initial Thoughts
Ansible

One of our clients recently wanted to start using Ansible on a project. As part of the new effort we wanted to investigate Ansible Tower as a potential way to use Ansible. This blog is a overview of the thoughts I had and some lessons learned. My next blog will be more specific examples of […]

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Designing a Certificate Authority for your Organization

Whether you’re setting up a VPN server or establishing SSL certificates for your internal websites, there are a lot of reasons to consider setting up your own certificate authority (CA) for your organization. On my current project, we ran into the former situation and quickly realized the widely recommended default of setting up a separate […]

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Creating ‘QA Friendly’ Machines in a Dynamic Environment

I’m currently working on a DevOps project, heavily centered around AWS GovCloud. It’s important to point out I’m working in GovCloud, as opposed to AWS, as this means several key tools are missing. My colleague, Alan Crouch, recently pointed out how NAT Gateways are missing from the offered infrastructure. Another tool we found missing was Route 53, […]

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Jenkins Workflow for Jenkins

Inevitably on any agile project with a good degree of DevOps maturity, engineers start looking less at the application efficiencies and begin to look at addressing issues with their pipelines and frameworks to deliver faster or more effectively. At Coveros, we call this “DevOps’ing your DevOps.” It is a silly sentence but it speaks to the challenge […]

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Essential Quantitative DevOps Metrics

Change is never easy. Change is even harder when you’re unsure whether your DevOps implementation is changing your team/application/organization for the better or worse. One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when adopting sweeping process or technology changes is a failing to identify measures to determine whether they are trending in a positive direction and when they […]

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DevOps in a Regulated and Embedded Environment: Scalability and Resource Concerns

Welcome to the fourth and final post in my series, DevOps in a Regulated and Embedded Environment. In this part, we’ll look at the problems that pop up when the deploy/test environments aren’t virtualizable. I’m assuming that you’ve already read my earlier post on “Git Flow in a Regulated World”. If you haven’t, the short […]

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