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
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.
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