Posts by: Ashley Gerwitz

We’ve recently been asked to explore introducing Rundeck into an organization that heavily invested in Puppet for their IT automation. What the heck is Rundeck? You can follow the link above for more details, but basically Rundeck is an API and user interface for performing operations tasks. It provides access controls, job scheduling and the

Previously, the awesome Geoff Franks invented a way to customize the root user’s environment in any BOSH job https://blog.starkandwayne.com/2015/06/05/customizing-your-bosh-vms-root-environment/ I said, "let’s do a bash | curl installer" so its much easier to get the custom environment into a one-time VM for debugging. He said, Then MKB chimed in, So, you’ve been warned. Because I

Keeping an Eye on Cloud Foundry This is the third post in the series about keeping an eye on Cloudfoundry. Click here for the previous post. What have we done? At Stark & Wayne we help our clients integrate cutting edge technologies in to their stack. Each of us is also tasked with extending these

At Stark & Wayne we’re still enjoying and expanding our use of Concourse for build/test/release pipelines and deployment promotion pipelines. For one, the dashboard looks awesome: Whilst the dashboard is great, it is only useful if people are looking at it. If a job fails and no one saw it, did it actually fail? So

After three years of using BOSH I’m still surprised that bosh cancel task is relatively ineffective. It doesn’t immediately cancel the task; rather it registers the request, and patiently waits for the current task to get into a state where you could safely cancel it. Which is almost never what you want. You know something

This weekend Dr Nic shared with us a well written article discussing the shortcomings of auto-incrementing (serial) keys and an alternative approach. While discussing the article the question came up about how to go about using UUID keys in our applications and what we have to do within PostgreSQL in order to use them. PostgreSQL

Let’s skip 5 minutes of warmup and jump in at “The Problem: The next 59 months” Everyone gets very excited about deploy something, at all. Like Docker people. “Look it comes up in 30 milliseconds!” You’ve never created a production problem so quickly. If a system lasts for 5 years or 60 months then I

At Stark & Wayne we are constantly thinking, planning, exploring and working towards the ultimate continuous deployment pipelines for our production systems & our customer’s production systems. Dr Nic spoke at CF Summit 2015 on this topic and his slides are now online. If you are looking for a new CI system that can help

When Ferran Rodenas first introduced the docker-boshrelease he included some example deployment manifests that used some example Docker images hosted on Docker Hub. The original Dockerfiles were hosted somewhere else again. And then we further complicated it by creating spiff templates and putting them in a different repo. Then a client asked an innocent question: