Decoupled approaches to deployment of IaaS workloads are the way of the future. Here, we'll try to construct a VM deployment pipeline leveraging GitHub Actions and Ansible's community modules. Proxmox Setup Not featured here: Loading a VM ISO is particular to the Proxmox deployment, but it's necessary for future steps. …

Read More

Spreadsheets are not an adequate method to manage IP addressing Different IP design strategies IPv4 Bogons, and the basics There are a number of valid and invalid prefixes for use internally within an enterprise. Here's a list of invalid prefixes in the global routing table; of those, the RFC 1918 prefixes are …

Read More

Patching all of my random experiments took too much of my free time, so I automated it This is a pretty cheesy thing to do, but over the years it became more and more time-consuming to maintain all the different deployed workloads and infrastructure. Requirements With all system design, it's best to consider all …

Read More

Synchronizing properly implemented DNS zones is, to put it lightly, a real chore: Creating forward DNS entries, e.g. A, AAAA, CNAME. These names are used to resolve to resources. Creating reverse DNS entries, e.g. PTR. Creating DNS entries that define the zone, e.g. SOA, NS For a system to behave properly, your forward …

Read More

Deploying Linux for the impatient If you've ever wanted to just "test something out really quick" in a live environment, Linux distributions have always been generally lightweight, but that's not the only implicit requirement for experimentation. A Linux IaaS distribution should be: Reasonably secure (basic …

Read More

Failure is not an option! It might surprise you to know that this quote wasn't real - it feels legendary, but was never said by Gene Kranz. It was written up for the film. The aerospace engineering discipline isn't really something everybody gets to experience, so it makes sense that "spicing things up" for …

Read More

With full-time remote work, internet outages transform from a nuisance to a real problem Prior to the pandemic, "working hours" were typically considered fair game by internet service providers to schedule necessary system maintenance. It's unrealistic to expect perfect uptime from any service provider - as …

Read More

The challenge with build automation is too much convenience Think about it. If it's easy to compose and deploy workloads, it's also easy to develop sprawl, and a good system designer would have methods in place to mitigate that. In a previous post I covered how to deploy vSphere VMs with Ansible and the Automation …

Read More

It's difficult to start a new software project Documentation Depending on how a software project starts, it can either be the easiest or the hardest aspect of a new project. Documentation suffers from a similar issue, so a good place to get things moving would be to simplify the basics of repository management. Here's …

Read More

Patience is tough when deploying automated code; Here's why it is important Reliability-centric infrastructure engineers need to focus on careful, procedural, validated workflows; the systems we're responsible are simply too important to casually "toss" infrastructure requests at a common API gateway. We …

Read More