Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status. A core tenet of DevOps is the ability to measure the state of your infrastructure for future improvement and this really needs to be automated programmatically. Ideally these APIs for automation and measurement are simple, easy to adopt, and accessible to people who aren’t full-time software engineers. Thus, beware of complex, language-specific APIs, and strongly lean towards vendors using simple HTTP or REST APIs and standard, easily parsable data formats like JSON.

–Nigel Kersten, Puppet Lab’s CIO. Also, see this interview I did with Nigel way back in 2008 when Nigel was using Puppet to manage the Mac desktops (!) at Google.

Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status. A core tenet of DevOps is the ability to measure the state of your infrastructure for future improvement and this really needs to be automated programmatically. Ideally these APIs for automation and measurement are simple, easy to adopt, and accessible to people who aren’t full-time software engineers. Thus, beware of complex, language-specific APIs, and strongly lean towards vendors using simple HTTP or REST APIs and standard, easily parsable data formats like JSON.

–Nigel Kersten, Puppet Lab’s CIO. Also, see this interview I did with Nigel way back in 2008 when Nigel was using Puppet to manage the Mac desktops (!) at Google.

Secondly, when evaluating new IT hardware and software assets for potential adoption, you need to institute a much stronger requirement for programmability and open APIs. Complete automation of your infrastructure requires programmatic access, and it’s simply insufficient to only have control via graphical interfaces. This isn’t just about provisioning and configuration support via such APIs, you also need to ensure that vendors are providing reliable APIs to get sufficiently detailed status. A core tenet of DevOps is the ability to measure the state of your infrastructure for future improvement and this really needs to be automated programmatically. Ideally these APIs for automation and measurement are simple, easy to adopt, and accessible to people who aren’t full-time software engineers. Thus, beware of complex, language-specific APIs, and strongly lean towards vendors using simple HTTP or REST APIs and standard, easily parsable data formats like JSON.

–Nigel Kersten, Puppet Lab’s CIO. Also, see this interview I did with Nigel way back in 2008 when Nigel was using Puppet to manage the Mac desktops (!) at Google.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch]

Connected Culture and Oblique Strategies episode #003 is up, in video form. We’re working on the audio only podcast and all that, but you can see the three videos we’ve done so far. Here’s episode 001 and episode 002.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch]

I’ve spent years puttering around at the “infrastructure layer” in IT: programming, systems management, cloud, all that gunk. From what I can tell much of the growth in IT is being driven by companies wanting to engage in “social” more. What is “social,” though? Indeed, that’s one of the things this podcast will try to figure out (hopefully with as much delightful rat-holing as Horace). Also, we’ll discuss my need for slippers that masquerade as socks so I can get them past my wife’s 2nd floor blockade.

Mostly though, it’s a McGuffin for getting to talk with Chris more.

On that note, here’s the video we recorded earlier. A podcast format with all the bells and whistles will follow.

We just having a working title now: Connected Culture and Obscure Stuff, which is much better than our original working title.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)