Hi, Not going into too much detail on the list but pretty much I have had the last 3 months to play around with VMs and environments, and that is what has caused me to do a lot of the learning. If you want to start with Chef the tutorials on the site are really good to start off with, and you can use hosted Chef so you don't have to spin up a Chef server. I used my own VMs in AWS, but you can do it from home with Hyper-V or similar so long as the network can get out to the hosted Chef servers. I have been pretty much off Chef for the last few weeks as I have been trying to do .net build stuff using open source tools like Jenkins etc which has been a real challenge, but I want to start writing my Chef recipes using test deiven development which is my next big hit list task I want to get done. The other thing of course is I am free and single which isn't ideal for me but while I am in this situation I am trying to make the best of it. Andrew. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Darragh Ó Héiligh Sent: 27 October 2015 21:41 To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Subject: Re: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? Andrew, I'm very interested in this. How did you get the dev ops role? Or more precisely, how did you get VM's to enable you to learn Shef? I really really really want to get away from the company I'm working in at the moment. I'm despritly trying to find ways of upskilling. I'm not having much luck unfortunately. Mainly due to a lack of time though. -----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Hodgson Sent: Tuesday 27 October 2015 19:50 To: Blind sysadmins list <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Could the DevOps movement be our saviour? 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 _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins