Mumbai Technology Meetup - DevOps Special

On July 27th 10 am a DevOps special meetup was conducted at Directiplex, Mumbai. Its very rare to see a meetup given importance as much as any other technology conference. Speakers from different organizations were present and shared their knowledge. Tremendous knowledge and experience shared free of cost. The meetup went on from 10 am (Started a little late) and went around till 5.30 pm. The agenda itself was too appealing.

No entry fees. Its a free event. Just ensure you learn and make use of that learniing :-)

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11.00 am - 12.00 pm : SaltStack [incl. LXC basic]: by Rigved Rakshit - Directi

Rigved introduced to LXC its setup, its concepts and how its similar/different than Docker. SOme commands and configs. Due to lack of time he could not cover Saltstack though

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12.00 pm - 1.00 pm : Configuration Management at Rackspace by Shaunak Kashyap - Rackspace

Shaunak conducted this on Hangout while he was at a 12 hr difference. Shaunak showed how rackspace uses Ansible for getting provisioning and other CM task automated.

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1.00 pm - 1.30 pm : Chef Fundamentals and DevOps by Sanju Burkule - OpexSoftware

Sanju took a brief introduction to Chef and how OpexSoftware who are partners of Chef and conduct professional Chef training with certifications. Sanju also shared his knowledge on how Chef is different from Puppet as he has used both.

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1.30 pm - 2.00 pm : Lunch - Lets not talk about this. Blame the rain.

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2.00 pm - 3.00 pm: Puppet [incl. preparatory VirtualBox fundamentals] by Ashish Chandra. - Reliance Jio

Ashish took introduction to Puppet some basics , how easy is it to setup a Puppet master and get going. He also shared some of his scripts that he uses to provision 500 instances in 6 - 7 minutes.

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3.00 pm - 4.00 pm: Ansible by Aditya Patawari - BrowserStack

This was the 2nd time I met Aditya, we met earlier at RootConf in Bangalore. Aditya shared introduction to Ansible and how is it better/different than Chef//Puppet.

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4.00 pm - 5.00 pm : Capistrano by Mayur Rokade - Directi

Mayur conducted a live demo of how to use Cap for deploys and a a little intro and setup for Capistrano.

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5.00 pm - 6.00 pm : Docker Fundamentals by Augustine Correa - Organizer of the event

Bugzilla Mail Sending Issue

Lately an issue was assigned to me where Bugzilla Email notification failed with an 504 gateway timed out error. We use gmail service for sending mails.

After checking the configuration everything seemed to be just fine, except the email was not getting sent and while updating any issue in Bugzilla a 504 error was sure to come.

After a little debugging we got rid of 504 by disabling Email service, but this was not quiet what we wanted. After googling a bit I got to know Bugzilla did not support Gmail as SMTP earlier, but now it did and that we need to install a few external packages for this. I found a tonne of articles with some misleading information or I don't know if I was doing something wrong there.

I applied this patch 1st in the Bugzilla setup directory.

patch < mypatchfile

I first installed Net-SMTP-SSL package after reading a few blogs with CPAN Shell 

perl -MCPAN -e shell

cpan> install Net::SMTP::SSL

./checksetup.pl

Check for Net-SMTP-SSL (v1.01)     ok: found v1.01

Later I tried sending notifications with SMTP in Administration > Parameters > Email (Many articles say that you will see a Gmail option or TLS option, however after installing many packages I didn't see any of those. I was unable to send a mail with SMTP even after many trails.

I finally switched to Sendmail, there was a delay but the mail was getting sent now. But the old problem was still there. Every time you update an issue, you get a 504. I suspect that because there was a delay in the mail being sent, the page used to wait for the mail being sent and then show up, but since it was too long, there could be a time-out value either in Apache or in Bugzilla config that showed up the 504 page.

Next I chose the option use_mailer_queue to be ON, and started the jobqueue.pl deamon. Now the mails are getting sent with no 504. I still suspect that it might have worked without the Net-SMTP-SSL package too.

RootConf 2014

I attended conference and workshop on Devops and Cloud Infrastructure - RootConf 2014 at Bangalore from 14th May to 17th May 2014.

Go Continuous Integration Tool developed by Thoughtworks

CI and Release Management tool developed by Thoughtworks. Helps to manage the build, test it and finally release. It allows you to distribute your build across many systems. So you can run your software on different platforms and make sure that it runs over all of them. You can even divide your tests and parallely run them on different systems, that way you get faster results. All the environments can be managed centrally, so you can promote builds from one environment to the next one.

Simple Steps:

1. Install Go Agent software on all the machines that are part of you system/cloud. 

2. Next configure all the agents to connect to the Go Server

3. Finally Approve every build from Management Dashboard.

4. Associate relevant resources tags for appropriate build tasks with the compatible agents (e.g resource linux, etc)

SELinux : Security Enhanced Linux

This session typically discussed about how SELinux is useful and how people do not understand its importance. Some security policies were discussed. Three important modes of SELinux; enforcing, permissive and disable. Also the hands on session discussed the behavior of these 3 modes of SELinux.

Docker : Light weight linux container

The dry-run of this session was conducted in the Docker-meetup we attended. It was a nice revision as well as some additional parts of docker were known in the session. Docker is a containerization tool that helps you make a light weight Linux container to pack, ship and run you application anywhere. It is an easy to learn tool with very few commands to be learnt and make your own Dockerfile. The containers can be shipped by making an image registry(or by using docker's image registry) by pushing the container from a dev environment and then pulling it from stage, test or prod. You are sure to see the similar environment as that of dev. So no more, "It works on my machine" reason to be heard.

Ansible : Configuration Management Tool

This is just another configuration management tool just like chef. The pros about the tools are :

1. No client server architecture

2. Very easy to install and almost no configuration needed.

3. Very simple to write playbooks, a non programmer can as well understand and write the code within no time since its just a yaml file.

Cons are:

1. Doesn't work on windows.

2. Not much support available since its relatively new.

Jenkins : Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration workshop was pretty much the way we do it traditionally. The workshop covered basics of Jenkins how a job is made and a build is tested an automated.

Conference Update 

Most of the conference talks focused on Docker LXC, Puppet/Ansible. Self healing techniques was introduced and sounded something that we could try and introduce wherein the servers would first intelligently check and see if the problem could be solved by its own with various scripts based on the type of issue. Technique to on board a new team member without merely asking him to read documentation and rather practice hands on was discussed in brief. Tsuru is a new tool that we heard of that may help us to simplify and automate docker as well. A demo on how to testing your infrastructure with Kitchen was shown and that is exactly how we learned it also a part of it showed integration with Docker which is something we need to implement. Introduction to Microsoft Azure cloud gave us an idea of how it is different than other cloud providers. Heartbleed was discussed in brief along with few other security threats and a demo on how Heartbleed actually affected.