January 29, 2017 - Brno, CZ
I think this is a special moment of the year, where in less than two weeks is possible to meet a huge amount of Open Source contributors in person.
Obviously you will need to take few flights, but it’s definitely worth.
DevConf this year was great.
I’ve been able to assist to a huge amount of talks (more than 20) and the majority of which were very interesting.
As always in conferences, there are themes heavily discussed and other completely absent.
This year at DevConf (like in many others conferences) containers are a very big topic.
The other big topic (related, but different) was Modularization, an approach Fedora is trying to
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December 13, 2016
When I speak with people that are starting with Ansible from Puppet, the first thing they want to experiment is Ansible Galaxy.
This leaves me very sceptical, since I think the default mode in Ansible should be DIY.
Since I’ve found myself in this situation far to many times, I decided to write down all the reasons why you should avoid Ansible Galaxy in the majority of situations.
Using Ansible Galaxy often violates the Ansible way.
My interpretation of the Ansible Way, is do not do adopt overkill solution (also known as the classic “Keep It Simple Stupid” principle).
Many times the Ansible Roles you can find in Ansible Galaxy are completely overkill because are created by people coming from the Puppet world (that has a completely different approach).
Modules that install for you and configure NTP or Java for any possible distribution (and sometimes even different OS) means that you substitute a couple of Tasks with hundreds of lines of code.
Often the majority of the code can be stripped because is not applicable to the specific environment.
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December 1, 2016
The single most frequent complain I hear about Ansible is about it’s slowness.
This is very common, but even more common among people that used to use Puppet.
There are many reasons why Ansible is slower than Puppet.
The three main reasons are:
- Linear execution: Ansible will execute each operation in order and will not run many steps at the same time as Puppet does.
- SSH Connection: all Ansible commands will be issued from the control system to the controlled system via SSH. On the other hand, in Puppet, all commands will be issued locally on the controlled host by the Puppet agent.
- Host limitation: since the Ansible Controller is involved with the process of applying changes to the controlled system, a limited number of systems can be changes at once.
Those limits come out from design decisions that preferred a simpler Playbook writing and a safer execution rather than speed.
There are some things that can be done to increase the performances of Ansible:
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November 1, 2016 - Villanova di Bernareggio, IT
In Italy every year, during the last weekend of October, there is the Linux Day, an “open day” for the LUGs where they create events to publicize GNU/Linux and the Free Software.
As usual (for the last 7 years now), the ViGLug organized this event and this time has been in Bernareggio (MB), a city less than half hour drive north-east from Milan.
This year, for the first time in the ViGLug life, we have partnered up with other two organizations BrigX (the Bernareggio LUG) and the Coderdojo Brianza.
This allowed us to have more diverse contents and to reach more people.
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October 30, 2016 - Milano, IT
From the 25th to the 27th of this month I’ve been at the SMAU in Milan (Italy).
The SMAU (Salone Macchine e Attrezzature per l’Ufficio, that would be Exposition of Machinery and Equipment for the Office) is an historical fair started in 1964 and that has had many changes over the years, for instance some years it has been opened to the general public, other times it was only for business visitors.
This year the event was targeted to business visitors.
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September 28, 2016
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This article deals with Ansible Tower <= 3.0. If you are looking for information around Ansible Tower >= 3.1, please look my newer article on the topic.
In the last few months I’ve setted up multiple times Ansible Tower, but I’ve noticed that there is not much documentation on how to perform basic maintenance on Ansible Tower High Availability setup, so I decided to write an article about it.
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August 7, 2016 - Kraków, PL
This year, I have been able to go to Flock :).
Flock location this year was Krakov (Poland).
Since my flight arrival time was very close to Mailga’s one, I waited him at the airport and then we went together to the Flock location.
This has proven to be a good idea, since we had the time to speak about some important topics around the Italian Community.
We then arrived to the Flock location, were we discovered a problem with the rooms booking, but that got resolved in a quick way by Bexelbie.
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July 11, 2016
Recently a customer asked me to help him debug an Ansible Playbook that was throwing a very generic error that was not helping at all.
The error was:
ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
As soon as I saw the error, I already guessed which problems could trigger such error: it’s either a bad usage of spaces, a badly escaped column within a value, or a variable escaping problem.
With a couple of grep runs, I identified it as the variable escaping problem.
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June 6, 2016
After more than 12 years as a freelance consultant, today I start a new adventure within Red Hat.
I’ve always admired Red Hat capability to run a multi billion dollars business selling services (subscriptions, training, and consultancy) on top of free software, so when I got the opportunity to join Red Hat I gladly accepted.
Joining Red Hat I’ll not change completely what I do, since I’ll go forward being a Consultant and I’ll work on similar products to the ones I work with today.
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May 15, 2016 - Amsterdam, NL
In the last few days I’ve been at the CodeMotion Amsterdam 2016.
This was my first CodeMotion and I have to say that I’m very impressed.
The organization was awesome, the talks very high level and the location, well, more than awesome - as you can see in the picture.
In those couple of days I had the opportunity to speak with many people, the majority of which are developers, and I learned a lot on the developer point of view of DevOps and containers.
It seems like developers are even more interested and excited than operations people from this paradigm shift, from what I saw.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog