Category Archives: DevOps

How not to waste time developing long-running processes

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Developing long running tasks might be my least favorite coding activity. I love writing and debugging code…I’d be crazy to be in this profession if I did not. But when a task takes long enough, your attention wanders and you get out of the zone.

Building the Linux Kernel takes time. Even checking the Linux Kernel out of git takes a non-trivial amount of time. The Ansible work I did back in the OpenStack days to build and tear down environments took a good bit of time as well. How do I keep from getting out of the zone while coding on these? It is hard, but here are some techniques.

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When to Ansible? When to Shell?

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Any new technology requires a mental effort to understand. When trying to automate the boring stuff, one decision I have to make is whether to use straight shell scripting or whether to perform that operation using Ansible. What I want to do is look at a simple Ansible playbook I have written, and then compare what the comparable shell script would look like to determine if it would help my team to use Ansible or not in this situation.

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Building the Linux Kernel in a GitLab Runner

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Git Lab provides a mechanism to run workloads triggered by a git commit. We try to let the automation do as much work as possible before interrupting a human code reviewer. We want to know if the code is right in as objective a manner as possible before we take the expensive context switch to perform a code review.

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Running git and gitweb in a container with Fedora

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There are many reasons to run a web service in a container. One of the remote services I rely on most heavily is git. While git local operations are fine in a global namespace, running a shared git repository on a remote server is a web-service based use case. There are three protocols used most commonly to remotely access git: git, ssh, and https. I am going to focus on the last one here.

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Deploying a Minimalistic Flask Application to OpenShift

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Some colleagues and I were discussing the network access policy of OpenShift. I realized it would be very helpful to have a trivial app that I could deploy to OpenShift that would then try to make a call to another service. So I wrote it using Python3 and Flask. Now that I have it working, I want to deploy it in OpenShift, again, in a trivial manner.

I would not deploy a Flask App into production without a Web server to front it. But that is what I am going to do for this test app.

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