Author: Chris Stankaitis

Chris Stankaitis, Team Manager, Site Reliability Engineering at Pythian, reflects on the theme of change at LISA16.

Before we begin, take a look at my previous two blog posts, SaltStack for Remote Parallel Execution of Commands and Using SaltStack for Configuration Management. We manage files using configurations management much for the same reasons that we manage packages…

Today is our day. July 25, 2014 marks the 15th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this day we pause and take a moment to forget the impossible tasks, nonexistent budgets, and often unrealistic timelines to say thank you to those…

In my last blog post I mentioned that SaltStack is a fully featured configuration management solution, but we never looked into using the tool in that way. Today we will begin to explore some basic examples of configuration management with…

There are many scenarios when a SysAdmin has to do a “box walk” of the entire infrastructure to execute a command across many servers. This is universally accepted as one of the less glamorous parts of our job. The larger…

The landscape of the systems administration field is shifting. As the trend continues towards Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other *aaS offerings, the traditional role of systems administration is being challenged. While this traditional model will remain (well beyond its…