The notion of automating tasks is built on the notion that caring about particularities of interfaces is not a good thing. That happens to benefit people who have trouble using interfaces (which includes blind folk like us). So sure, automated repeatable processes benefit everyone but blind people a bit more so. Glad you're having fun with configuration management. On Tuesday, 27 October 2015, 7:49 pm +0000, Andrew Hodgson <andrew@hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
Hi,
Over the last few months I have been working in the UK as a DevOps engineer for a large retail company in the UK. This is my first real DevOps job, but started to get into it before then. I am really excited about the opportunities this could bring to some blind sysadmins who are open enough to change their working practises a bit.
Let’s talk about the initial stages I went through. I was given an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on day 1 to work with some build automation servers. Now, this website is sort of ok for confident screen readers to use, but it’s not efficient. In the DevOps world, that isn’t a problem, because you aren’t really expected to use the website to manage the objects in AWS; you manage everything with the AWS API and plug-ins for various tools such as PowerShell, Linux etc.
So now if I want to view AWS instances, I can use PowerShell, or mainly I use Chef’s knife commands to get and manage the instances etc. I can start, stop, deploy and manage instances with a single command. I can also script this if I want.
Moving onto configuration management, instead of running lots of GUI tasks or going on a server and running loads of commands, documenting all those steps and configuration into a large document that nobody reads, and is possibly inaccurate, if we use a configuration manager like Chef to do the work for us, then we don’t need to go on the servers at all. Instead of RDPing into a server, configuring IIS, etc., I can write a Chef recipe that will do all this for me, and apply dev practises to this, such as storing the recipe in a version control system, so we all have a definitive knowledge of which is the latest version of the file. Why bother writing a recipe that actually goes through installing IIS, when I can just go and pick up an IIS recipe that someone has already written and is validated by the rest of the Chef community; programmers have been doing this for years. In case anyone thinks that this is too hard, here is an example Chef recipe that sets up a base in IIS for a website:
# Cookbook Name:: My-Website # Recipe:: default
# Install IIS and the ASP.Net 4.5 module to serve pages. include_recipe 'iis::mod_aspnet45'
#Remove the default site as we want our new site to be served from the root. include_recipe 'iis::remove_default_site'
# Create the website storage folder. directory 'D:/Websites/MySite do recursive true action :create end
#Create application pool for the site. iis_pool 'MySitePool' do runtime_version "4.0" action [:add,:start] end
#Create the actual site that runs from the root of the URL. iis_site 'MySite' do path 'D:/Websites/Ranging' application_pool "RangingPool" action [:add,:start] end
I know I am only a beginner, and there is a lot of progress to be made certainly in Windows and the DevOps world, but I think people should be really excited about the benefits this technology could offer blind people.
Thanks. Andrew. _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins
-- Will Estes westes575@gmail.com