Category: Infrastructure
Cron instigated contention
Compute resources are 21st-century utility, much like water, electricity and gas there is a limited supply. When you run out there are implications, even when the period was brief. This can cause to unexpected failure scenarios in systems thought to be resilient to failure. tldr: If you have cron jobs […]
Read MoreMDI: Monitoring Driven Infrastructure?
Adam and I attended the London Infracoders Meetup last night which featured a demo of serverspec and Beaker. When I asked Adam what he thought he wasn’t impressed*. “I don’t see the point of this if you’re using Puppet unless you’re worried about typos or you don’t control your production […]
Read MoreHigh Availability Scheduling with Open Source and Glue
We’re interested in community feedback on how to implement scheduling. TIM Group has a rather large number of periodically recurring tasks (report generation, statistics calculation, close price processing, and so on). Historically, we have used a home grown cyclic processing framework to schedule these tasks to run at the appropriate […]
Read MoreThe Summit is Just a Halfway Point
(Title is originally a quote from Ed Viesturs.) This past week, TIM Group held its Global Summit, where we had nearly all of our Technology, Product, and Sales folks under the same roof in London. For those who aren’t aware, we are quite globally spread. We have technologists in both […]
Read MoreScenario testing for infrastructures
Recent advancements have allowed us to provision an entire environment with a single command. The next major challenge facing us is how to perform updates to environments, this gives rise to an additional set of challenges (and constraints) for our automated provisioning system. We’re working towards a provisioning system that […]
Read MoreExported Resources Considered Harmful
Our infrastructure automation is driven by Puppet, so this post is mainly going to talk about Puppet – however the key problem we have (and issues we’re solving) is equally relevant for most other current configuration management tools (such as Chef). One of the key challenges for configuration management systems […]
Read MorePuppet Camp Barcelona
I recently had the pleasure of being asked to speak at Puppet Camp Barcelona. I’d submitted a talk a few months ago about some of the problems my team was having with our uses of puppet, and how we’re adapting to change how we use puppet. I was extremely pleased […]
Read MoreMonitorama
This is a blog post that was written in 2013, but somehow was forgotten about. So here is a bit of history! — Andrew Parker Last month I got the chance to attend the Monitorama conference. This was out and out the best conference I’ve visited so far this year […]
Read MoreDevopsdays London
This is a blog post that was written in 2013, but somehow was forgotten about. So here is a bit of history! — Andrew Parker Most of our Infrastructure team and a couple of developers we had seconded to the team all attended the Devopsdays London conference a couple of […]
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Introducing Orc and its agents
This post is the third part of series documented here (part 1) and here (part 2). In the previous post we discussed the Application Infrastructure Contracts. These contracts mean that new applications can be deployed to production with minimal effort because the infrastructure tools can make assumptions about their behaviour. […]
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