APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT WITH SALT AND VRA

Here is a short post, around my first integration between SaltStack and vRealize Automation.

Expect this to be updated, as I get more experience in SaltStack.

Note VMware (The company I work for), bought SaltStack, so I don’t know, what the future plans look like, and if this is the correct way going forward, to do this kind of integration.

DOCKER FOR ALMOST EVERYTHING

I’m no expert in containers, but I do talk to a lot of admins in my job, that has not taken the time, to look at containers yet, and therefore haven’t found, if they can be a usefull tool, for them.

I think it has a lot to do, with containers, being something developers use, and all the talk around Kubernetes (K8S). And that’s just a long way away, from the tasks many sysadmins do in their job. My personal take, is that there is a lot to learn, from the way developers do things, but that is another post :-)

AUTOMATING FOLDING@HOME WITH VMWARE CODE STREAM

I am always looking for new ways to do demo’s, and to showcase the solutions the company I work for have. One usecase, that I really wanted to show, was infrastructure as code (IAC), using a combination of both VMware and opensource tools. But not just as a deploy and destroy, but also as a way to maintain state in something that keeps running, and do the changes, from a source repository, like Github.

MOVE BLOG

For the last year or so, I have seen a lot of people, talking about their move of blogs, from a traditionel CMS system, to a static site.

I have had this on my todo, for quite some time, but I have also been quite satisfied, with blogger (my old blog hosting). But the fear of Blogger being shutdown, like so many other Google services, have long had me thinking about alternertives.

JENKINS AND CODESTREAM CSRF FIX

For some time, I have had the problem with Jenkins, that when I ran my Code Stream pipeline, it gave me the following error 

To fix it, I have been running the code below, in the Jenkins “Script Console” 

import jenkins.model.Jenkins

def instance = Jenkins.instance

instance.setCrumbIssuer(null)

This has been ok, until my container, running Jenkins, restarted or got updated, and then I got the error again.

DEMO ENVIROMENT ON DEMAND

A couple of years ago Jad El-Zein (@virtualjad) created a demo, where he ordered a VM (I think it was) using Siri on his iPhone, with vRealize Automation (VRA).

As a side project, to another thing, I’m working on, I thought I would recreate that demo, in a 2020 VRA Cloud version.

HOW TO SHOW THE VALUE OF AUTOMATION

Being able to show the value, of automation is essential, to be able to keep getting support, for the time you spend on it.

One of my coworkers (Tore Brynaa) , gave me an idea, on how we could show that value back to the business, for the customers that have begun using vRealize Automation.

REMOTE DEVELOPMENT FROM ANYWHERE

VScode is that type of software, that I hated in the beginning, and now love (for the most part).
I have never been any good at coding, scripting etc. but the more my day job, exposes me to automation, the more I want to learn. And along with that, I found out, that VScode, was one of the thing, I better learn to love (or live with).

VMWARE CLOUD MANAGEMENT SERIES

I have started a new Cloud Management (CMP) series where I want to show, just how easy it is to get started at doing CMP.

It’s all in Danish, to keep it local, but I will will update this post, to keep all the videos in one place.

1. Multi Cloud Blueprints in Cloud Assembly.

K8S INGRESS AND PFSENSE FIREWALL

I have been playing a bit with Kubernettes (K8S) lately.
Since it’s running on my vSphere environment, and not a public cloud, I don’t have native access to a load balancer, so I have to use the Ingress Controller instead.

Right now i’m using Rancher to deploy the K8S cluster, and due to lack of static ipadresses on my nodes, a LoadBalancer is not an easy thing to get working, it seams.