Monday, July 20, 2015

How to avoid boring work

Over the past few years working as an IT consultant, I've learned that having easy access to a robust lab where I can learn or test solutions is critical. But my approach to building a test lab has changed over the years.
These days I prefer not to "build" a lab but to "define" one — it is a better use of my time.
Building requires a long step-by-step process of installing all the necessary components: OS, databases, app servers, one by one based on the documentation. 
Instead, I can define a lab using tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Oracle Enterprise Manager, on top of tools that manage Virtual Machines like Vagrant or libvirt.

I presented my thoughts during Irish Oracle User Group conference in March 2015 ( How to avoid boring workand now I would like to start a series of blog post about this.


Here is a list of topics I plan to cover in the next few weeks:
  • Creating and managing a Virtual Machine using Vagrant (create a new box, add storage, use KVM or AWS EC2 as providers )
  • Installing and configuring Oracle Database using Ansible ( Thanks to great work of Mikael Sandström on his Github Ansible repository )
  • Integration of Delphix "Data as a Service" product with an automated test environment build

regards,
Marcin
  

2 comments:

Mikael Sandström said...

Hi Marcin,

Thanks for the mention!

I'm currently developing some Ansible modules to handle users, grants, tablespaces, asm diskgroups etc. Will end up in my Github when they are getting to a working state.

regards
/Mikael

Marcin Przepiorowski said...

Hi Mikael,

Thank you very much for your work !!!
Ansible module for this will be great !!! Keep us informed.

regards,
Marcin