Currently RICON|EAST is going on in NYC. Tom Santero and the whole Basho crew is doing an awesome job if the content available via the live stream and twitters is to be believed.

This is probably the most difficult blog post I’ve had to write. What’s worse is I’ve been sitting on it for months.

People may or may not have noticed but I’ve been largely offline for the past 4 weeks or so. This is because I’ve been in the middle of a pretty heavy redesign of a few key parts of our application stack. This also required me to learn Java so I’ve been doubly slammed.

As part of that redesign, I worked on what we lovingly refer to internally as the “solo installer”. I gave a bit of background on this in a post to the Chef mailing list at one point but I’ll go over it again as part of this post.

This post is something that’s been brewing for a while. While it may sound targeted in tone, it’s more general than that. Let’s just call it an open letter to family, friends and coworkers around the world.

Since I just tweeted about this and I know people would want an explaination, I figured I’d short circuit 140 character hell and explain why I think EBS was the worst thing Amazon ever did to AWS.

So it’s come to my attention that today is the “anniversary” of when I wrote my first “#monitoringsucks” blog post.

It always starts with a tweet. However it normally doesn’t start with a tweet from Cliff Moon.

Of all the problems to fix in chef or puppet, the diffusion and drift of state that occurs in idiomatic usage seems highest priority.

So it looks like Adrian Cockcroft finally spilled the beans on Netflix (no)Operations and sadly it reads like I expected.

Recently I saw a tweet from Kohsuke Kawaguchi that really got me frustrated.

So anyone who knows me knows I spend an inordinate amount of time bitching about Maven. I don’t know if it’s the type of companies I end up working for or what but I always seem to find myself ass-deep in Maven.