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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

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