Personal Blog 3

This post comes at the end of week 6 of studying at the QA academy. 2 weeks ago I was informed of my specialisation within the academy. This was chosen by a dark and mysterious process which seems to have little to do with our personal preferences and probably more to do with some kind of dice rolling. That is not to say I am disappointed with the selection, for whilst I had initially pushed for DevOps, I was selected for AWS Cloud which I am quite happy with. So there I was thinking about all of the cool cloud things I will be doing, when it turns out the cloud people are basically doing DevOps anyway for the first 4 weeks. So ultimately I ended up getting what I originally wanted anyway.

The past two weeks have primarily been spent working on a group project based around using puppet to do what we did in the original CI module back in week 2. That project was completed in two days individually. This time we had a group of 5 people and two weeks to do basically the same thing. Turns out that puppet is a bit more complicated than just using bash scripts (not that there weren't a lot of bash scripts to be written anyway. So after large numbers of setbacks errors, red text etc. we finally managed to produce a working automated installation through vagrant and puppet. Then we upgraded to puppet enterprise which broke everything and set us back to square one on most of the modules.

I feel like this has been a highly educational module in the value of knowing what is going on. I personally spent a day and a half trying to install Zabbix from a .iso file only to conclude that it was basically impossible to automate the procedure. At which point we mentioned this to the instructor who told us to download a completely different file and start from the beginning. Equally it turns out that files consisting of nothing but text can apparently contain additional information which they don't tell you about until you are 15 minutes into a test installation and a syntax error is called. We then had 3 different people combing a file for an invisible question mark for about 3 hours. It didn't show up until we copied and pasted the text into another text editor...

So in conclusion DevOps is a slow and painful process fraught with errors and I look forward to continuing to watch copious amounts of green and red text flow past on a screen.