opstreeblog, Author at DEVOPS DONE RIGHT

2015 – What an exciting year has gone by

OpsTree 2015 Journey

2015 – What an exciting year has gone by. We have had all the fun we could have asked for. We learnt, grew, built relationships, earned valuable trust and we did all these because we are driven by our core values of honesty, transparency and assiduousness. At the onset of the new year, we would like to thank all our partners who laid their valuable faith on us and helped us do our bit in their success stories. Read on to know all about 2015 at OpsTree.

We built great partnerships

2015 at Opstree was a year filled with excitement and challenges and success. The team grew and we shifted to a great new office, but most importantly we built great partnerships. The team worked towards achieving the agreed goals with the intention to go beyond the expectation of our partners at each step. Our relations with our partners stand testimony to this.

We multiplied productivity by learning

We grew qualitatively by deciding to invest heavily in learning. We dedicate one full day per week towards self-development and learning. The results of our learning is evident through the thought leadership initiatives like our blogs, github contributions and open source contributions. But for us, what is more valuable than thought leadership is the significant improvement in the knowledge pool of the company. Today our resources are at least 2x more productive, because of their commitment to learning.

We matured as Devops Company

We found that there three types of requirements in the market and we aligned our offering along that line. We divided our company into three verticals

1. End to End devops management – This vertical works closely with Product companies typically startup/midsize companies. OpsTree manages the complete dev/tech ops of such companies which allows our partners to focus on their core function while they still have state of the art infra setup and happy end users.

2. Work with big players – This vertical works with large service companies in team augmentation/back to back devops contract mode. This enables OpsTree to create an impact on bigger players through our esteemed partners.

3. Devops Solutioning –This team consists of devops architects who are passionate about devops. Architectural decisions, development of libraries, solutioning and conducting trainings is what drives them.
Worked with some prestigious Logos

Some of our key outcomes for the last year have been the end to end management of DevOps operations of certain well established product companies. It is through their recommendations and references that we are growing at this fast pace. All our client relations have been partnerships where we have grown together to help each other deliver the best. Our expanding team is filled with enthusiastic people who are always looking for their next challenge.

We Guarantee improved Productivity

At the core of everything we do are our core values of giving our best to every project and trying every possible method to get the most optimized outcome. Giving our partners a “wow” experience is what we aim for.

Welcome 2016

It is well researched and accepted fact – ‘Devops helps companies deliver more’. Gartner says by 2016 DevOps will evolve from a niche to a mainstream strategy employed by 25% of the Global 2000 organizations. We are ready for this exciting new tomorrow. Are you?

The Reset Button !!!!

!!!! The Reset button !!!!

Anyone who has recently used the Google Compute Engine for creating the VM instances will be aware of the reset button available.

Since I wasn’t very much sure of it , I just clicked it without much know-how . This resulted in making all the servers to their original state as they were freshly build and which is certainly a very bad thing for us.

But , we had puppet that we used to create the whole infrastructure as it is . All the modules we had used and changes we made were committed to GitHub repo and this certainly was a boon to us, else we have to sit whole day long for making those changes on the servers.

Just in couple of minutes the new instances were created using the compute engine-create group instance feature. We did installation of the foreman and git on one of the servers and set up the puppet clients agents accordingly . This took around 15 more crucial minutes and then cloned our GitHub repo which contains all the necessary modules and configurations required for the rest of infrastructure.

These are the conditions where Configuration Management Tools like Puppet come in picture and help us get on the track in the shortest possible manner.
It was a hectic day but definitely made us learn several important aspects. Using puppet for maintain the infrastructure is really important now days. It is reliable,efficient and fast for deploying configurations on the servers and making ready for the production work load.

Setup Jenkins using Ansible

In this document I’ll walk you through how you can setup Jenkins using Ansible.

Prerequisites

OS – Ubuntu {at least two machine required in production}
First machine for Ansible installation
Second machine where we will install jenkins server
You should have basic understanding of ansible workflow.

Note : You should have password less login enabled in second machine. use this link
http://www.linuxproblem.org/art_9.html

Ansible Installation
Before starting with installing Jenkins using Ansible, you need to have Ansible installed in your system.

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpsTree/AnsiblePOC/alok/scripts/Setup/setup_ansible.sh | sudo bash

Setup jenkins using Ansible
Install jenkins ansible roles
Once we have ansible installed in our system, we can start installing the jenkins using ansible. To install we will use an already available ansible role to setup jenkins

$ ansible-galaxy install geerlingguy.jenkins

to know more about the jenkins role hit this link https://galaxy.ansible.com/detail#/role/440

Ansible roles default directory path is /etc/ansible/roles
Make ansible playbook file

Now the next step is to use the installed jenkins roles to install the jenkins. For this purpose we will create a playbook and hosts file with below content

$ cd ~/MyPlaybook/jenkins

create a file hosts and add below content

[jenkins_hosts]

192.168.33.15

Next create a file site.yml and add below content

—

– hosts: jenkins_hosts

roles:

– { role: geerlingguy.jenkins }

so configuration file is done, the next step is to run ansible playbook command

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

Now that Jenkins is running, go to http://192.168.33.15:8080. You’ll be welcome by the default Jenkins screen.

Opstree SHOA Part 1: Build & Release

At Opstree we have started a new initiative called SHOA, Saturday Hands On Activity. Under this program we pick up a concept, tool or technology and do a hands on activity. At the end of the day whatever we do is followed by a blog or series of blog that we have understood during the day.

Since this is the first Hands On Activity so we are starting with Build & Release.

What we intend to do

Setup Build & Release for project under git repository https://github.com/OpsTree/ContinuousIntegration.

What all we will be doing to achieve it

Finalize a SCM tool that we are going to use puppet/chef/ansible.
Automated setup of Jenkins using SCM tool.
Automated setup of Nexus/Artifactory/Archiva using SCM tool.
Automated setup of Sonar using SCM tool.
Dev Environment setup using SCM tool: Since this is a web app project so our Devw443 environment will have Nginx & tomcat.
QA Environment setup using SCM tool: Since this is a web app project so our QA environment will have Nginx & tomcat.
Creation of various build jobs
- Code Stability Job.
- Code Quality Job.
- Code Coverage Job.
- Functional Test Job on dev environment.
Creation of release Job.
Creation of deployment job to do deployment on Dev & QA environment.

This activity is open for public as well so if you have any suggestion or you want to attend it you are most welcome

Marrying Nginx with ELB

Few weeks back I got a requirement to setup a highly available API server. I said not a big deal! I’ll have Nginx as a reverse proxy(Why not directly exposing API via ELB a different story) and my API auto scaled setup will sit behind an internal ELB and things would be in place TA DA.

Things worked perfectly fine for few days, but one day the API consumer reported that they are not getting response back, what? When I checked the API url was indeed returning a 502 error code. It was really strange for nginx to be sending 502 response back that meant the highly scalable setup was down? Well I was proven wrong ELB was working perfectly fine as the curl request to internal ELB was returning proper response, so yes the highly available API setup was in place. What next, yes! Nginx error logs. I did saw Nginx reporting connection timeout with 502 error code. The interesting thing to note that it was an IP(random IP assigned to ELB), when I tried to do curl hit on that IP for API request, it did failed EUREKA EUREKA!! I reproduced the problem.

Well now I’ve to collect all this information and infer what is the logical cause of the problem, and yes there are lot of smart people available who would have fond the solution to this problem so I’ve to ask right question in Google :). The question was “Nginx using Ip instead of domain name” and the answer was “Nginx caches the IP at the startup and obviously as ELB is Elastic in nature so it’s IP changes over the period of time”. That was the reason Nginx was trying to talk to the older un-associated IP’s of Internal ELB.

Finding solution was not a big task as it was just about making sure Nginx should talk to ELB not the IP’s associated with it, that’s why said marrying nginx with ELB :).

I’ll not go into the actual solution as there are already solutions available in web. I referred this really good blog as a solution.

http://ghost.thekindof.me/nginx-aws-elb-dns-resolution-nginx-resolver-directive-and-black-magic/