a couple weeks ago i went to a workshop/training event, and shadow-soft asked if i would review it and do a guest blog. so here it is. :)

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being invited to a workshop hosted by Shadow-Soft here in Charleston. I had been to a couple of their events in the past, which were mainly after work meet-ups in conjunction with other companies, or CloudForms training, but never a full-day workshop. Knowing what I know about Shadow-Soft, and seeing as how the event was partnered with Red Hat, and seeing as how I have been a Red Hat/Fedora junkie since the early 2000’s, I absolutely could not miss this.

Their marketing content for the event had several words that jumped out at me immediately–Security, DevOps, OpenShift, PaaS. This is my playground.

To shed some light on why this piqued my interest, I’ve been working at a company called SPARC for almost 5 years now. We were acquired late last year by Booz Allen Hamilton, so we are now SPARC, an Agile Systems Delivery Hub of Booz Allen Hamilton. My role here has run the gamut from production operations, to mobile development, to web development, to devops, to security. I now manage both development and production workloads, and am responsible for engineering, securing, deploying, automating, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure and Linux systems that host several of our client applications, all from within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

That said, I knew this workshop would be valuable.

Everyone started showing up at around 10:30. We were all getting settled in, picking out swag from the sign-up table, grabbing coffee, some mingling and catching up here and there. There were a handful of familiar faces, as is usually the case at tech events in Charleston.

Derrick Sutherland, Chris Chandler, and Christian Chekroun, all from Shadow-Soft, got us off to a great start with a little marketing and information about the company, what they do, and what they hoped to get out of the event. To be honest, I was expecting a lot more of that throughout the day, as this was a free event and very well put together. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that most of the day would consist a deep dive into OpenShift with several well put together labs, a fairly detailed discussion around EnterpriseDB and various other database tools, and a great technical overview of SecurePaaS, Shadow-Soft’s application security solution.

After that, we jumped right into the nuts and bolts of OpenShift. The last OpenShift training I attended was probably 3 or more years ago. A lot has changed since then, so gears are essentially now pods, everything is built around Docker, almost everything looks different, and there are a lot more great features.

Everyone was given their own OpenShift installation to work with, and the labs and slides were provided on an 8G flash drive from Red Hat that we got to keep. Normally I would be adverse to plugging a mystery flash drive into my laptop, but I trust Derrick, and Red Hat, obviously, to have already done that homework for me.

The first couple labs were fairly short. The goals were to get the command line tools installed, and to get familiar with the dashboard and find your way around your projects. We went on to deploy our first Docker image, which was a simple guestbook application, and exposed the services so they were accessible from the browser. Once the application was deployed, we could scale up and down by tweaking our ReplicationController settings, and if pods went down (or in our case, we deleted them), we watched the application self-heal and deploy itself to new pods.

We then did the same thing, except with a new project pulling from a GitHub repository hosting a Java application. We forked it to our own GitHub account so we could easily make changes to the application, watch OpenShift pick up the changes, and deploy the new version. We set up a Postgresql database in the project, and we also set environment variables in the project, so they were applied across all pods. Because those environment variables were used in the application code, the application picked up our environment variable changes immediately, and was able to access the database.

Since I do not use OpenShift on a regular or even semi-regular basis (though I wish I did, and hope to in the future), I was finding several features I favored over some of Amazon’s tools during the labs. OpenShift most closely resembles Elastic Beanstalk, and I have never been a huge fan of Elastic Beanstalk to begin with. After using OpenShift yesterday more thoroughly, it made me realize that Red Hat has basically taken everything I’ve either complained about or wanted as a feature in Beanstalk (and a few things in Amazon EC2), and implemented or improved upon it.

I definitely favor OpenShift’s web console/terminal over the one provided in EC2, as it works in Chrome flawlessly, without having to make any plugin tweaks. And their log output made me envious. EC2 and Elastic Beanstalk need to take some notes. For example, make the logs available on the screen without having to download them. Make them easy on the eyes–lime green on black is great in The Matrix, but not in real life. Timestamps are absolutely necessary. Sometimes, it’s the little things.

Other nice things I noticed are the webhooks and build tools. Right now, projects I maintain either use Jenkins or Shippable for deployments. Jenkins automatically deploys builds to our development and integration/testing servers on one project, and Shippable deploys builds to Elastic Beanstalk on another. The nice thing about OpenShift is that all of that is built in, essentially eliminating the need to roll our own Jenkins server or use a third party service, unless you choose to go that route, which is still an option.

The last lab was using a template to create and deploy an entire project, similar to how AWS CloudFormation works. Pretty straight forward–just a JSON file that included everything we just did all pieced together, so you can deploy ALL THE THINGS with the click of a button.

And that was the end of the OpenShift labs! I especially appreciated the refresher course, since OpenShift Enterprise Administration is my next goal on my way to finishing my RHCA. Plenty of time was allotted between labs to allow everyone to finish and ask questions and discuss what they were doing and get more coffee, and Derrick and others were readily available to answer any questions and help troubleshoot when necessary.

I envy people like that. The ones who can absolutely nail the marketing spiel, introduction, presentation piece of something like this, explain the bits and bytes to a mixed crowd, no sweat, AND you know they’re also the ones crushing it on the back end as engineers.

After OpenShift, we were given a presentation by Robert Bates of EnterpriseDB on, you guessed it, EnterpriseDB! If you’re not familiar with EnterpriseDB, it’s Postgresql, but it’s bundled up nicely with licensing and support, a ton of tools, and much more. After only a few minutes, it had me wishing we could migrate some of our projects to EnterpriseDB/Postgresql from Oracle. To the point where I was furiously googling and reading further about EnterpriseDB to see if this was actually feasible for one of our projects. Maybe one day. My biggest takeaway from this part of the day, however, was not EnterpriseDB (though I learned quite a bit and will absolutely look to use that in the future instead). My biggest takeaway was a brief demo on HammerDB running queries against EnterpriseDB and comparing the results with Oracle. Performance was similar, if not better (which was the point of the demo), but more importantly I had never used HammerDB before and now I have something new to play with.

As always, the biggest perk of coming to events like these–you can only leave smarter.

Robert wrapped up and Derrick took the stand again. This time, to discuss SecurePaaS. I had never heard of it until that day, and reading about it on the website only makes it sound like magic. But the demo debunked any magic going on, as Derrick did a fairly thorough demo of how SecurePaaS monitors your applications. The most impressive part to me, however, was how easy it is to deploy and manage, and how granular it can get. One jar file and one parameter applied to your application’s deployment process, and you can see everything SecurePaaS does on their nice shiny dashboard within your environment.

Typically, workshops of this nature have a lot more sales people who aren’t quite as tech-savvy. Or they will have technical people who can’t always speak the right language to the people who make the sales decisions about the products they’re showing off. A lot of workshops like this that I have been to just barely scrape the technical stuff, providing a high-level overview of their products, and focus their time on explaining how they can save or make your company more money. Which, I understand, but both sides are important.

Let me say, that I was most impressed this week by Shadow-Soft, EnterpriseDB, and Red Hat (as always, fanboy speaking). Everyone at this event was more than capable of speaking at both ends of the spectrum. The amount of material covered and the amount of knowledge I gained in a mere 4-5 hours is something I would have expected to have to pay for, and these guys did it for free. Not only that, but they want to continue this roadshow and put on more workshops in the future. My only regret is missing the happy hour that followed. :)

That said, I hope this writeup conveys the value in this DevOps Journey series, and all of what these companies have to offer. These guys want to continue the devops discussions, the security discussions, the discussions that bring out the geek in all of us. I will be attending the next one, and if they’re ever in your area, I highly recommend you do the same.

this week has been a complete 180 compared to last week. the plague that is HFMD ended. lucky for me, it ended the night before my red hat training began. no more blisters, no more ulcers, no more fever, no more crippling foot/hand pain, no more messed up face, no more saltwater baths every night. of all the sicknesses i’ve ever had, i have to say, that was the worst.

training was… awesome. as always. i know i’m a red hat junkie at heart, and i am of course biased, but this class, like the others, was fantastic. every instructor i’ve had has gone above and beyond to make sure we’re prepared for our exams. always friendly, helpful, open to any and all questions, and personable. this was no different.

there were only 5 of us in the class all week–pretty similar to last time. i was the youngest again, and the only girl. but it was a fun bunch of guys, all incredibly smart and interesting. none lived in charleston, and this was the first class i’d taken in charleston, so that was different.

the training was at LCE. i work with several people who work there, but had never actually been to their office. it’s in a really nice (in my opinion, at least) area near west ashley, right by the river. there’s a marina right there and you can see the water from the building. pretty short driving distance from a LOT of good restaurants. the only downside to this place is how extremely quiet and empty it is. i’m so used to SPARC, and let’s just say… SPARC is nowhere near quiet.

this was the first class i’ve taken where they brought us food. actually, no. my rapid track course in raleigh brought us food, but it was the same subway/jersey mikes/whatever styled sub sandwiches every day. which was fine, it was delicious. but LCE totally takes the cake on this one. they brought us printed out menus from a different local restaurant every day. sesame, east bay deli, panera bread, kickin chicken. we were told to circle whatever we wanted on the menu, and they bought it to us. plus, there were snacks, coffee, and juice provided in the classroom at all times. we were spoiled rotten this week.

the exam was the same as the rest of them as far as format goes. this is the first red hat exam i didn’t study for. i’m not bragging–it just wasn’t going to happen. i was working late every night since i couldn’t get much done during class, and when i looked at my book, it just wasn’t happening. for one, i was exhausted this week. too much going on. secondly, this exam was WAY less comprehensive than the last one i took. it was a breath of fresh air. it was narrow but deep, which is much easier (to me) as far as exams like this go. it helps that almost all of the work i’ve done over the past several years is entirely based on some virtualization platform (vmware, AWS, KVM, etc), so the skills are entirely transferrable. i really had a leg up on this one. it was a good feeling, for sure.

i passed, so now i’m trying to figure out a way to get myself into the next training. i’m addicted. RHCA is my end goal. it will happen, no matter how long it takes.

as for this week, tomorrow is a big day. i know i’ve mentioned stre.am a handful of times on here. we went to jacksonville earlier this year to make our debut with the team, but now we’re official. we have a contract to stream at every game this season (meaning stre.am and all its glory will be featured on one of the jumbo video screens in the stadium), so STRE.AM ON! we’re driving down at 7 tomorrow morning for the jags/colts game, and this will be my first NFL game ever. i’m stoked. even if it means waking up at dawn to go get a minivan rental. that is A-ok with me.

about 15 of us are driving down tomorrow morning, taking 2 cars. we’ll be running around the game streaming the fan experience and whatever we run into. i will be checking servers in a panic every so often, and it will be glorious.

i’m incredibly proud of our team. we’ve gained a lot of people, lost a lot of people, and stre.am has changed a lot since the beginning last fall. it’s hard to believe it’s almost been a year. i’m happy to be part of such an awesome team, and am excited to see where it takes us.

see you soon, jacksonville!

i had my 3rd flight class yesterday. contrary to what i thought was going to happen, like, actual flying, we had an actual class.

don’t get me wrong, i learned a lot. but walking around a plane for an hour doing pre-flight checks is not nearly as exciting as taking off on my own for the first time (meaning hands-off instructor, me doing the flying). which is what i thought was going to happen. evidently that’ll happen next class. the only good thing about this is my class only cost me $72 (no fuel! hooray!) instead of $140.

either way. i learned a lot. and so did my instructor. will get there in a minute.

he taught me (again) all the parts of the plane. i sat quietly and listened, because i quickly realized he did not remember teaching me any of this 2 weeks ago. understandable–it’s flight school. i’m not the only one. and reiterating things is always good. because, for the life of me, i can not seem to remember the word AILERON. i don’t know why. the worst part is, when i try to think of the word, the only word that comes to mind is “areola”, and god forbid i ever spit that out instead.

he gave me the pre-flight check sheet, which includes things like making sure there is no obvious damage to the outside of the plane. checking all the lights (inside and out). checking the bonding strips and static wicks (these things are awesome, they literally “wick” electricity from the surface of the plane). making sure the brakes aren’t leaking fluid and that there is enough air in the tires. checking the fuel levels AND fuel contaminants. which was really neat, minus the fuel squirting out of the wing and going all over my sleeves. i got to climb on top of the plane and check the oil.

there was a lot more but i’m not going to go there.

basically, all the things you should do before driving your car, and then some. because, well, cars don’t have wings, and they don’t even have to be in great condition to drive from point A to point B.

if your car has a giant dent in the hood? fine. if your plane is all banged up? not so good.

the list is like 100 or so items long, and it takes a fielded pilot who’s done it at least a dozen times to be quick(er) at it. it took me about an hour. i’ll get there eventually. in about $6000 or so.

well, ricky (instructor) and i were walking around the plane. he’s quizzing me on things. i forgot aileron. and i forgot “flaps”. how can you forget the word flaps? i know what everything does and i know what it’s all for. as long as it’s not the other way around, i think i’m safe.

we start talking about the engine and he’s like, “do you know anything about engines?” i told him i have a basic understanding (i’m pretty good at figuring shit out) and i’d ask questions if i didn’t get it. so he starts going on about how every little thing works. literally. where all the knobs and controls in the cabin connect to the rods on the outside of the cabin (within the body of the plane). what every belt and gear is for, while pointing them out in the nose of the plane.

then he gets to the air filter. i’m pretty familiar with air filters. i know that when the one in my house gets clogged up, i can’t breathe worth a damn. and i know that when the one in my truck needs to be changed, my dad yells at me.

ricky asked me, “what’s the first thing you should check when you look at the air filter?” now, the air filter on the plane (this particular model of plane, i know nothing about any other plane) is outside and exposed. right on the front. my response was the most obvious one i could think of.

my response was, “MAKE SURE THERE’S NOT A BIRD IN IT!” apparently that was not the answer he was looking for but i think he felt bad and so he said that while it was inherently correct, you should check to make sure that it is white and looks clean. i maintain that if there was in fact a bird in it, it would not be white, nor would it be clean. so technically, i still win.

so then ricky asked me, “what happens when the air filter isn’t clean?” well, i have no idea. but i know that it’s not good. and i know the one in my house doesn’t allow me to breathe without inhaling a bunch of pet dander. i waited for him to answer instead of looking like an idiot again. his answer was a bit more complicated but basically if your air filter is clogged up you can get carbon monoxide built up in the cabin and you will suffocate and die in a horrible plane crash.

and that is bad.

but not nearly as bad as my reaction, because instead of being like “oh no, that’s terrible! i will always check my air filter”, i was like, “oh no, that’s exactly what happened to my hamster!” except not in a plane and more like in his cage, and not because he didn’t have a decent air filter, but because our furnace leaked while we were out to eat and i came home to him belly up and could do nothing but cry to my dad saying, “PEPE’ IS DEAD!”

not quite the response he was looking for. and i don’t think he’s fully convinced that i understand the grave importance of having a clean air filter in an airplane. next class, i’m going to let him do the talking. i’ll do the flying. and that will be that.

today has been productive so far. i will say that much.

i got more signatures. see, they give us this check in sheet. it has like.. 13 things on it. each “thing” is a department and/or person you have to find, give them one of your 823943 forms filled out, and convince them to initial your check in sheet. i started working on it this morning since yesterday i was only able to get 2 people to initial it. just 2. lame. this is the most UN fun scavenger hunt i have ever done in my life. there isn’t even any candy at the end. :mad:

this morning started out with a golf cart ride down to the main building again (thank you, zan, for not throwing me out of the golf cart). this building has almost all of the people i need to sign off on my sheet. it seemed like the right start… until i realized that 3 of the people i needed weren’t even there yet. this morning was only mildly successful BUT i got a better grasp on how to actually navigate said building without feeling like a rat in a maze. almost. i got 2-3 signatures and, drumroll, MORE FORMS! i filled them out on the golf cart ride back, went back into my building, more paperwork. forms. etc. i brought my lunch to work today but a bacon cheeseburger from five guys (the burger joint, for all you weirdos) sounded far more enticing.

i got back from lunch and had to go do this mandatory training in another building. i drove over only to find out it was the exact same training i completed like, 3 weeks ago? as a contractor. yeah. i even asked the woman if it was the same thing, and she assured me it was entirely different. NO. so i clicked through it for 10 minutes. the lady was like, that was fast, and i told her i was not about to sit through and actually read all of that again. not that i actually read it the first time, though. i know the consequences of leaving my computer unlocked, thank you very much. the last time that happened, my own boss set an image of a strange hairy man wearing a banana hammock as my desktop wallpaper. in my opinion, that is FAR more effective than awareness training. whatever, to each his own.

i got that done. i ran back to the crazy maze building to see if the missing persons from this morning were there yet. lucky for me, they were there. all but one person. the most important person on the check list–the person i’m actually supposed to GIVE it to so i can say i completed it on time. evidently, she’s gone for the whole week. awesome. i can’t even remember to study for my linux+ exam (CRAP, it’s tomorrow), so hopefully i will at least remember to go back on monday and try to find this woman.

despite all my complaining, i am in a better position than a lot of new hires, apparently. some people don’t get laptops for several days or weeks, and some people’s clearances take weeks to go through. i got lucky in that i actually get my new laptop tomorrow AND my clearance went through on the first day (though it did involve a lot of extra running around). it is not fun having people escort you to and from the bathroom, so that’s quite a relief. it could always be worse.

in the meantime… i guess i’ll study for linux+, although i think the CISSP maxed out my study-time-attention-span for the next, uh, 5 years. o_0 WISH ME LUCK!

i got back from baltimore late last night. this week flew by quicker than i ever thought it would. i had heard from a handful of people how bad it was going to be (the training i attended) and to my surprise, they were SO WRONG!

i don’t know if i’m just a dork or if it had something to do with the coffee (i will get to that bit momentarily) or if it was really as fun as i thought it was… but i had SO MUCH FUN during training. it certainly had the potential to quickly turn into death by powerpoint. and it didn’t. it really didn’t. i mean, we were in training from 8:30-3ish every day. the room was set up in a horseshoe, projector in the center. 4-6ish people were conducting the training, and they all had a sense of humor and understood the vitality of bathroom breaks during sessions like this. we had 10-15 minute breaks every hour. spectacular.

i can’t tell the internets what the training was for, but i can say that i think a lot of people were bored out of their minds. i am basing this decision on the fact that there were a few people with their heads propped up against the walls, mouths open, eyes closed, out cold.

i love talking about technology and security and absorbing every bit of it that i can. and the fact that my job combines that with the military absolutely fascinates me. it’s always something new and exciting. and the last 3 days were nothing but that. sure, there was some dry material in there at times, but that’s to be expected. they also threw in a lot of xkcd and lolcats in the powerpoints, and they were all relevant, so kudos to the geeks who put that together. i love you.

i am certain this field is where i belong. it just fits. i learned a lot. i also learned about coffee.

until tuesday morning, these lips had never touched coffee. i had a mocha, once. it was about 1/2 whipped cream (i don’t like whipped cream. i know. i’m weird.) and it was not that good and it made my stomach hurt. i got lost on the way to the training tuesday morning so my original plan to stop at a gas station and buy bookoos of 5-hour energy failed miserably, leaving me with no other choice. i had to drink coffee.

after the first hour of training, i looked at elizabeth and told her i needed help making coffee. you don’t know how to make coffee? no, crazy woman! i have never had it. please assist me in my caffeinated adventure. she informed me that you’re supposed to put creamer and sugar in it. i did that. i put like a half a cup of sugar in my coffee. i also put a boatload of creamer in it. and then i found the hot chocolate powder mix and it was over after that. i dumped half the bag into my cup.

my coffee looked like chocolate milk. and it tasted pretty close (minus the scalding hot part) except i am convinced that you can never fully get rid of the coffee flavor. i suppose i will have to get used to this. on day 1, i had 2 cups and i couldn’t force my face OUT of a smile for the remainder of training. everything was amusing. i kept giggling. i think the most amusing part was the frequent heart flutters and the fact that after the first cup and a half, my hands wouldn’t hold still enough to actually bring the cup to my lips. i also had to go to the little girls’ room about 7 times that day.

on day 2, i upgraded myself to 3 cups. and also on day 3. i have decided i will no longer live without coffee in my life and i will finally use the coffee maker in my kitchen cabinet. i’m not entirely sure why i have one, but somehow i acquired it during college and it stuck with me during the move.

IF YOU BUILD IT, HE [coffee] WILL COME.