enterprise 3 workbook key
We've got an Excel spreadsheet floating around right now (globally) at my company to capture various pieces of information about each countries technology usage. The problem is that it goes out, gets changes, but they're never obvious, and often conflicting - and then we have to smash them together. To me, the workbook is no more than a garbage in/garbage out type application waiting to be written.
Has anyone worked on these types of quick and dirty apps before in normally large-scale, heavy-handed enterprise environments with success? Any tips for communicating this need/appropriateness to non-technical management?
IMHO, The major fear that an enterprise organization has - especially if the application becomes more critical to it's core business - is how to support it. If it doesn't fit into it's neat little box of supported technologies, it's less likely to happen.
As I thought about the name for this article, the idea of teaching an old dog new tricks kept coming to mind -- followed by the second notion that I'm the old dog. My background started in the help desk and eventually evolved to the title of systems administrator, with skillsets in data center servers, storage, virtualization and networking. The idea of a private cloud is well known in this space, but it may be hard for engineers that grew up in this monolithic data center to branch out into new areas such as data center DevOps, as these areas are usually seen more in public and hybrid cloud scenarios. I recently had an opportunity to dip my toe into the world of enterprise automation and I wanted to share my experience. This article is for those engineers with a similar background looking for guidance to get started with automation.
Automation is formalizing some of the things I was already doing. I had done a bit of scripting over the years to help me with administrative tasks, but it didn't go past that. I was creating tools for my own consumption but not integrating them into the data center as a shared, accessible and repeatable offering. The idea of enterprise automation is exactly that, allowing users or an event to launch reusable code that can execute a complex list of tasks. Through automation we can achieve measurable and quantitative value to the business. Rather than just performing manual tasks as part of \"keeping the lights on,\" formal automation allows us to record the efficiencies gained by our work. With the time saved on not performing manual tasks, look to recognize other areas to automate and continue to achieve real business value and not just technical value.
The Ansible software that is the key product of enterprise automation is a paid product called Ansible Tower. There is also an open-source version of Tower called the AWX project. If your organization does not have Tower, look into deploying AWX to get things started. Tower and AWX present a web interface that allows for playbooks and projects to be built and executed from. Tower also hooks into GitHub so that GitHub is the single source of truth for code and version control. I uploaded my YML file to GitHub and connected it to my Tower project. Now whenever Tower needs to run my code, it can check GitHub to make sure it is running the latest revision.
This is the last task of my playbook to power the VM on after reverting the snapshot. Using the same module, the steps are similar to my first task. The only difference is that I want to change the VM to the \"poweredon\" state. Now that the workbook is complete, I verify that the code is uploaded to the GitHub repository. I instruct my Tower project to use my repository as a code source.