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.
participants (1)
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Andrew Hodgson