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My Open Source Journey

Way back, in my late teens, when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, I had created myself a geek’s paradise in my basement. I had a chemistry lab, with equipment sourced through my high school, a microscope, a telescope, and an … Read more

(Re-)Introduction

It’s good to be back. After being a central part of the birth of LPI more than two decades ago, I am delighted to be back here in the role of Director of Community Development. My new role is to … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #14: Taking the Test

Congratulations, you’ve made it to the final posting in our DevOps Tools Introduction series. Throughout the last few months, we’ve explored new topics each and every week. Working through all the referenced resources was a significant investment of time. In … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #13: Log Management and Analysis

While running, most applications, containers and virtual machines constantly generate information about numerous events. These events can be anything from severe errors to a simple notice that the server successfully answered a request. Collecting and analysing this log data become … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #12: IT Operations and Monitoring

While we have talked a lot about application deployment, we still need to cover how to keep these applications up and running. The DevOps Tools Engineer exam covers IT Operations and Monitoring in objective 705.1. The core technology of this … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #11: Other Configuration Management Tools

In addition to Ansible, which is covered in great detail in the DevOps Tools Engineer exam, several other configuration management tools exist. Objective 704.2 expects you to know the architecture and basic features of Chef and Puppet. The Chef documentation … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #10: Ansible

Objective 704.1 of the DevOps Tools Engineer exam covers configuration management using Ansible. With a weight of eight, this is one of the most important topics on the exam. This should be reflected in the time and effort spent learning … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #09: Machine Deployment

The last few DevOps tools blogs focussed on container virtualization. One of the major benefits of containers is their incredibly fast startup time and their small overhead. However, containers are not suitable for every type of deployment. There are situations … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #08: Container Infrastructure

While Docker and Kubernetes make it easy to start and manage containers, there must still be a base system hosting the containers. These systems form the infrastructure on which containers run and are covered by objective 702.3 of the DevOps Tools … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #07: Container Orchestration

While individual Docker containers usually run a single program, applications in a microservice architecture are usually composed by combining multiple containers; each contributing a specific set of features that make up the complete application. Coordinating the creation and maintenance of … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #06: Container Basics

Container virtualization is one of the major technologies behind modern software architectures. While the concept of container virtualization is rather old, new tools extend the pure virtualization components with numerous features that facilitate the deployment of containerized software. Docker is … Read more

DevOps Tools Introduction #05: Continuous Delivery

Turning source code into running services requires a series of steps. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are key concepts behind automating, as much as possible, build and deployment processes. LPI covers CI/CD in objective 701.4. Martin Fowler offers … Read more