March DevOps Meetup

There will be 2 great talks this month.

1. Tests Or It Didn't Happen: Testing your applications + automation from the outside-in

2. The Problem with Separating Data from Puppet Code

3. Tests Or It Didn't Happen: Testing your applications + automation from the outside-in

To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is DevOps.

-- DevOps Borat, 2011/02/27 (https://twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT/statuses/41587168870797312)

When a tweet about your shiny new web app can take down your infrastructure, and clusters of 1,000+ servers are becoming common, automated infrastructure is the only way to scale your operation.

But how do you know that your automation is doing what you expect? Even more importantly, how do you verify that your systems are doing what you think they are actually doing?

This is a critical question not only when you're modifying existing infrastructure, but also when you're building something from scratch, or when you're troubleshooting a monitoring alert at 3am.

Just as testing is now an essential part of modern software development, testing is becoming more and more important for sysadmins when administering large and complex infrastructures.

Leo Venegas will be talking about ScriptRock's approach to solving these problems, covering a brief history of ScriptRock, the reasons behind why they built their product, and how testing aids developer + sysadmin collaboration through a common dialect.

2. The Problem with Separating Data from Puppet Code

Gary Larizza from Puppet Labs will be along to talk about ways we can separate out configuration data from Puppet modules & manifests with Hiera.

Hiera is a hierarchical database that can query YAML and JSON files (and any other data serialization for which you write a custom backend), as well as Puppet manifests, for configuration data.

• Configuration data is the term we use for the environment-specific data that needs to be plugged in to your Puppet code (i.e. variables, class parameters).