If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you. At this point, I’ve worked for a few companies that are SaaS vendors. In most cases, we’ve also done some sort of private install. Drivers for private installs There are a lot of reasons people want private installs.

This is a first for me. I’ve never reviewed a book before. There’s an uncomfortable amount of arrogance I feel in doing so but I thought it was important. Recently the Site Reliability Engineering book came out. This is the description directly from the O’Reilly site: {% blockquote %} In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google’s Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world.

I’ve mentioned a few times across various tweets that I’m a big fan of Rundeck. Since a few folks have asked why/how we use it I figured a blog post is better What is rundeck? The way I typically describe rundeck is “a web interface for shell scripts”. That’s a bit unfair but that’s the simplest thing for people to grok. If I recall correctly most of the concepts of rundeck were spun out of a larger product from DTO Solutions called Control Tier.

At we’re currently in the process of reconfiguring our monitoring, logging and alerting setup. Obviously this is something near and dear to my heart. At my previous employer we did everything in house due to various constraints. I’ve got a rich set of experiences in this space so my first inclination was to build not buy. However, due to OTHER constraints, building was not a practical solution at present. After much research and evaluation, we finally settled on the following stack:

I just realized it’s been almost a year since I wrote a blog post

I’ve been using it for a while on a smaller scale but a recent project at work had me putting it through its paces and working out the issues I had. A few of my issues in the past have revolved around: reusability composability lifecycle “safety” (i.e. don’t blow away an entire running stack accidentally) scope Scope One of the mistakes I made when first using terraform was trying to “do too much” with it.

I can’t believe I have to even write this but it seems that comprehension is hard and sadly I made the mistake of reading comments when someone posted my systemd redux article on HN. CoreOS Yes I know CoreOS uses systemd. It seems that ONE comment got taken entirely out of context. If you take it WITH the context of the whole post: If you must use Linux And we’ve agreed that systemd is here to stay in Linux Use a Linux “distro” where you don’t care that it’s running systemd CoreOS is not a traditional general purpose Linux.

I figured it was about time for a followup on my systemd post. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but time hasn’t allowed. The end of Linux Some people wrongly characterized this as some sort of hyperbole. It was not. Systemd IS changing what we know as Linux today. It remains to be seen if this is a good or bad thing but Linux is becoming something different than it was.

Over the past several months, I’ve written a lot of blog posts that were critical of various software. If it wasn’t clear from these (sometimes) incoherent ramblings, there was a common thread that bound them all together Why do we write software? I write software every now and then. When I do, if possible, I put it up on github for folks to consume. I’ve talked about this before. For me, being able to write code and somehow that code helps someone blows my mind.

I’ve done a lot of tweeting about systemd lately. My internal conscience constantly reminds me of John Allspaw saying that twitter is just pretty much perfect for snarky comments (paraphrase). Al Tobey asked me a good question: {% blockquote %} I honestly want to know why you dislike it so much. You clearly know wtf is going on. I haven’t heard a specific technical problem. {% endblockquote %} First mistake is thinking I know wtf is going on.