DevOps job interviews with old fashioned check list questions

During the last few weeks I have been interviewed for several DevOps positions. In two of them I had to reply a skills check-list and in the other one an exercise to be solved and send back by email. I think these check-list interviews are not good for DevOps positions, specially  if the check-lists used are not updated properly. Let’s see why…

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A Quick and Neat :) Orchestrator using GNU Parallel

Sometimes you have to deal with servers that you don’t know anything about:

  • You are a short temp IT consultant with not previous knowledge on the environment.
  • The CMDB is out of order.
  • You are on a DR situation.
  • Or simply the main administrator is not there.

And you need:

  • Run commands in parallel
  • Get info from many servers at a time
  • Troubleshoot DNS problems
  • Check how many servers are up and running

On my systems I use two orchestrators: MCollective and SaltStack (configured automatically using puppet) that fulfill my needs. But let’s see a quick way to have an orchestrator in a rapid manner.

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Bootstrapping a new VPS on a DigitalOcean droplet with puppet client up and running in 4 mins 15 secs.

I have been working with DigitalOcean for several months, on average DigitalOcean deploys your VPS server in 55 seconds. After the server is deployed, all the manual/prone to errors/boring configuration process is needed.

As I am using puppet to configure all my servers I have create provisioningDO rakefile script (based on John Arundel’s book Puppet 3 Cookbook)  to deploy and configure my servers in 4 min 15 sec. It means After 4 min 15 secs, my servers are ready for production.

provisioningDO uses Jack Pearkes’ tugboat CLI tool so, a fully installed and configured tugboat CLI is necessary. It shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes to have a working and ready to go tugboat installation 🙂
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Creacion del Alicante Puppet Users Group

Llevaba ya tiempo dandole vueltas a la idea de montar un grupo de usuarios de puppet en Alicante, que no se si habra muchos…

La semana pasada mande un correo a la lista de usuarios de puppet por si habia alguien interesado y hoy he recibido un correo de puppetlabs.com indicandome que si tenia un grupo de meetup, que ellos me pondrian un link en su web. por lo que me he decidido a crear un group en meetup.com.

Por lo que oficialemente hoy ha sido creado el Alicante Puppet Users Group

Asi que si estas interesado en Puppet, DevOps, Data Center and Operations Automation y basicamente hacer las cosas una sola vez y que los ordenadores hagan el resto. Este es tu grupo.

Espero que os apunteis y cuando seamos unos cuantos hagamos la primera quedada.

Salu2 puppeteros Alicantinos

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