Skip to main content

Keeping Busy – Akamai changes, Change windows, and QA

Been super busy cleaning up from the move, and trying to make progress on the QA environment buildout and other projects. We need to get QA up so we can shut down the old datacenter, and stop a bunch of replication scripts we wrote. We’ve been building out a lot of VMs, and messing with the Netapp Flexclones and such, pretty useful. Should be done with QA later next week hopefully, but with the late start I’m not sure. It also depends how the weekend release goes.

I am trying to provision a bunch of new properties with Akamai and the China CDN. It’s always slow going getting approval from the government when we provision, but it works out well. Kind of annoyed I bought a Akamai SSL certificate (up to ten domains) and now they need professional services when I want to use a domain off it. Its like nothing is ever simple with them, too bad they own the market, if I don’t like it I can’t go elsewhere

Need to nail down some better maintenance windows and communications about releases and timing, this should help the sanity of all the IT folks, not just my area (Techops). I wish I had a good change management system that was simple and good for maintenance. Every solution I look for for simple notifications and change management and notification is complex, expensive, and overkill for my needs.

QA is using a terminal server to do testing, which avoids them having to do hostfile hacks. It should help the testing accuracy, and we can much better control how they do their testing. Simple fix for an annoying problem!

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm curious to know what you consider 'simple change mgmt' to be. I find that lot of the time when dev, qa and ops talk about change mgmt they mean totally different things and the vendors end up trying to pack all those different things into one package -- which makes things get real expensive real fast
Friday, January 30, 2009 3:32:00 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dynatrace Growth Misinformation

For my valued readers: I wanted to point out some issues I’ve recently seen in the public domain. As a Gartner analyst, I heard many claims about 200% growth, and all kind of data points which have little basis in fact. When those vendors are asked what actual numbers they are basing those growth claims on, often the questions are dodged. Dynatrace, recently used the Gartner name and brand in a press release. In Its First Year as an Independent Company, Gartner Ranks Dynatrace #1 in APM Market http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/06/prweb12773790.htm I want to clarify the issues in their statements based on the actual Gartner facts published by Gartner in its Market Share data: Dynatrace says in their press release: “expand globally with more than three times the revenue of other new generation APM vendors” First, let’s look at how new the various technologies are: Dynatrace Data Center RUM (DCRUM) is based on the Adlex technology acquired in 2005, but was cr...
10 comments
Read more

Misunderstanding "Open Tracing" for the Enterprise

When first hearing of the OpenTracing project in 2016 there was excitement, finally an open standard for tracing. First, what is a trace? A trace is following a transaction from different services to build an end to end picture. The latency of each transaction segment is captured to determine which is slow, or causing performance issues. The trace may also include metadata such as metrics and logs, more on that later. Great, so if this is open this will solve all interoperability issues we have, and allow me to use multiple APM and tracing tools at once? It will help avoid vendor or project lock-in, unlock cloud services which are opaque or invisible? Nope! Why not? Today there are so many different implementations of tracing providing end to end transaction monitoring, and the reason why is that each project or vendor has different capabilities and use cases for the traces. Most tool users don't need to know the implementation details, but when manually instrumenting wi...
2 comments
Read more

IBM Pulse 2008 - Review

I spent Monday-Wednesday at IBM Pulse in Orlando. It was a good show, but quite a few of the sessions were full when I arrived. It was frustrating because they didn't offer them more than once. The morning sessions were mostly pie in the sky, and not very useful to me. I got to spend a lot of time with senior people in engineering, architecture, and acquisitions/strategy. I also got to meet people I knew from online or other dealings with IBM. Overall, the show was a good use of my time, and I found it enjoyable. Here are some of my highlights: ITM 6.2.1 improvements including agentless capabilities and such. New reporting framework based on BIRT which will be rolling forward. New UI which is being pushed and was on display from TBSM 4.2. Hearing about what other customers are up to (mostly bad decisions from what I've seen). Affirmation of ITNM (Precision) as a best of breed tool, with a excellent roadmap. Some things which are bad and make no sense: Focus on manufactur...
6 comments
Read more