DAVE
STRENG

Everyone likes to throw “Cloud” around as the buzz-word du-jour these days, but for once it actually defines my specialty.

I started as a basic call-center IT guy and moved up through the enterprise world as a cloud-native engineer specializing in automation processes and infrastructure-as-code pipelines.

What the hell does that mean?

I take nasty application deployment processes and automate the creation of the underlying resources they run on, then automate as much of the configuration as possible. From VMWare to AWS, I’ll do it!

What does that do?

One word…Standardization….
By automating the deployment processes, you greatly speed up delivery of your infrastructure to your app teams and prevent configuration drift from one deployment to the next, be it a new feature or a totally different application.

You end up with an environment that’s well integrated with itself that allows you to take real action on a macroscopic scale without having to worry about as much of the special snowflakes that plague automation efforts.

Tools

HashiCorp Terraform

Terraform is a great tool for infrastructure pipelines and infrastructure-as-code processes. Being cloud-native, its adaptable to any environment and provides a flexible framework that allows you to control how you deploy and manage defined resources. Excellent for usage in AWS, GCP, or Azure but somewhat limiting when used with VMWare on-prem.

RedHat Ansible

Similar to other configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef, Ansible takes an agentless push approach (except when using ansible-pull) built off of Python. This alone makes it great for developers to build their own modules and for overall module support, but I think what I like most about it is the ease of writing your plays/playbooks in YAML. I’m a big fan and have used it across all environments with a lot of success.

AWS CloudFormation

Similar to Terraform, CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code tool built for provisioning resources in AWS alone. While Terraform’s cloud-native approach allows provisioning across many different environments, CloudFormation provides AWS deployments a variety of features that other tools lack, like better roll-back capabilities and fully managed resource state. For intricate deployments, CloudFormation has definitely saved some headaches.

ServiceNow
Integrations

Every great infrastructure tool is great for provisioning infrastructure, but when it comes to managing that infrastructure, your CMDB is your lifeline. I’ve had significant experiencing managing and developing processes to automate server deployments, patching, and software deployments fully integrating ServiceNow and it’s CMDB. It’s a great tool that can be very flexible in the right environments.

DevOps Tooling

Git - Source Control (always a necessity)
- Atlassian BitBucket
- GitHub
- GitLabs
Jenkins - Application Deployment Pipelines
Slack - Messaging webhooks, notification integrations, and custom commands

Operating Systems

I’ve had good experience with a wide variety of Operating Systems (invaluable when building an efficient deployment pipeline.
- Windows Server (2008-2019)
- RedHat Enterprise Linux (6/7/8)
- CentOS/Fedora
- Ubuntu