TL;DR We have started work on an Ansible Style Guide. We hope it will encourage re-use and collaboration in our community, increase the velocity of delivery, and ultimately improve the quality of our infrastructure The dark art of turning computers into science Keeping pace, together Infrastructure as code Code as Community Contributing to the Commons A guide, not a standard Style guide in action Reducing “Not Invented Here” Syndrome Improving re-usability Solving the problem at the source A better generator Testing by default Summary References and Footnotes The dark art of turning computers into science “e-Infrastructures” composed of many...…

TL;DR I have been thinking about how to include a vulnerability scan in a pipeline to deliver applications to EGI FedCloud sites. The big picture A CSIRT’s job is never done ! A distributed computing platform is inherently open to risks, even more so a collaborative platform. Ensuring that the platform is safe and secure for users is a thankless, full-time job. The attack surface can be very large indeed when one considers a platform like FedCloud - there are several layers to it which may provide vectors for exploits. While the majority of these can be locked down by...…

Time to get real So, we’ve created a slack bot based on Hubot, and written a deployment scheme which is 12 factor-y. The bot comes with a few batteries included, such as common scripts for finding pictures of cats and throwing pugs at one another, which is great and all. But we came here to chew bubblegum and get done - and we’re all out of bubblegum ! We need to start giving this dude some things to do - things which are currently taking up our human time. That’s why we started this whole thing in the first...…

Walking before you’re born to run Previously, I wrote about how I’d really like to build a bot, and wrote down the basic steps to getting started. I’m writing this next post to talk about what to do next… development could go in two directions : Flesh out the bot functionality Make the bot more stable At the moment, we have a pretty stupid bot : Dude doesn't even have a face, yo ! Be useful, dammit. I need to get this guy to do useful stuff ! I’ll have to remember to write a blog post about what exactly...…

A bot to help our team get done Let’s cut to the chase: getting things done requires a sidekick these days. I don’t know about you guys, but I used to get upwards of a hundred reminders a week via email telling me to do thing. These reminders come at times which I have no control over, interrupt me and usually always get put in the “do this later” bin. Worse, most of these tasks were pretty banal and ripe for automation - some of them were “meta-tasks” like, “remember to remind person of thing they have to do”....…