Skip to main content

Simplify and Automate

Now that the workload has reduced a bit over the last month or so we can spend time doing project work. It's always been my philosophy to simplify as much as possible, this is normally because I end up having to fix messes, which are normally caused by undue complexity. Complexity can affect performance, availability, and manageability. Automation can often create complexity, as can requests by various people in the business who don't necessarily plan the projects or requests they make of others (especially development and operations).

This being said I often get blocked when I try to simplify things, because people want to build things out in a more redundant manner than is required for the business needs. There are a lot of ways to create a redundant system without creating complexity, you just have to step back and look at the overall configuration and requirements to come up with the best solution.

We get a lot of requests from our QA team to reload various Resin app servers, and other processes. What we are doing now is creating a web based interface for them to do the reloads on their own. This eliminates the need for operations to run the scripts, and saves time and resources.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Patching and updating for home and corporate

We all are well aware of the Microsoft patches and windows update.  Same goes for those of us who use itunes and iOS devices, we know Apple Software Update.  Some of us may even patch our Adobe products, which we should since they have been the largest attack vector (http://goo.gl/bOQ3D) for the past 2 years hands down.  This is just at home.... How do you expect the security experts to keep on top of all of these patches in a corporate environment.  The number of patches for Oracle alone is daunting to understand and analyze. There are ways to do this, you can use some clever software which I will outline below, or you can read ~25 RSS feeds and analyze vendor security bulletins.  I do enjoy doing some of this, but I don't have time to keep on top of all the releases.  Here is some software for home and corporate use to help manage this. Corporate Patch Management: Microsoft WSUS and SCCM - This is free and a no brainer for patchi...
2 comments
Read more

Moving to the Cloud and Packing up DR

In other news on a side consulting gig I am doing we moved the company from exchange to Google apps. It's been a bit painful, but it will be more efficient in terms of cost and support. With DR being very important to the firm, this is a perfect fit, especially with the Postini archiving solutions. With such a small firm it made a lot of sense, and should prove to be a perfect fit. Also we are re-architecting the overall infrastructure from a dual location (DR) setup with clustering to a single location. In the process we are moving from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2. I haven't done a lot of Hyper-v, but I have done a lot of VM work, Windows, and iSCSI. This should prove to be an interesting project both on technology and moving to cloud based resources, as well as the future direction of the company. Expect more soon!
Post a Comment
Read more

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