Author: Kevin Pedersen

The Cost of Starting with DevOps

As DevOps practitioners, we’re often challenged to justify what’s considered “additional effort” to automate deployments and operational tasks, particularly when starting new projects that may have dependencies on initial environments and infrastructure to get data or application workloads enabled for…

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Developing Capabilities Takes Practice

In my previous blog, “What’s the Measure of a Maturity Model?”, I discussed the idea that a maturity model may be inherently flawed in its focus, which measures the qualitative characteristics of the process against an idealized model of maturity instead…

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What’s the Measure of a Maturity Model?

whats the measure of a maturity model?

In the Cloud Ops line of business at Pythian, a key area of concern for our team is maturity, and over the course of this year I’ve been asked to put thought and effort into the development of a maturity…

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Creating dynamic tasks using Apache Airflow

What’s Airflow? Apache Airflow is an open source scheduler built on Python. It uses a topological sorting mechanism, called a DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) to generate dynamic tasks for execution according to dependency, schedule, dependency task completion, data partition and/or…

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7 tips for managing Infrastructure with Terraform

Kevin Pedersen, Team Manager, Service Reliability Engineering at Pythian, provides some considerations to keep your Terraform environment manageable.

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A repeatable test environment with Terraform and chef-solo

Kevin Pedersen, Team Manager, Service Reliability Engineering at Pythian, discusses creating a repeatable test environment with Terraform and Chef-solo.

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Essential Hadoop concepts for systems administrators

Of course, everyone knows Hadoop as the solution to Big Data. What’s the problem with Big Data? Well, mostly it’s just that Big Data is too big to access and process in a timely fashion on a conventional enterprise system….

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