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InfoQ Homepage Automation Content on InfoQ

  • Article Series: Automation in the Cloud and Management at Scale

    Cloud computing is more than just fast self-service of virtual infrastructure. Developers and admins are looking for ways to provision and manage at scale. This InfoQ article series will focus on automation tools and ideas for maintaining dynamic pools of compute resources.

  • The Top Automation Tools for Public Cloud at Scale

    As more organizations expand their use of public cloud services, from early-stage startups to the biggest businesses and governments in the world, the problems of cloud computing at scale start to arise.

  • Purely Functional Configuration Management with Nix and NixOS

    This article gives a short introduction to NixOS, a Linux distribution, and to Nix, the package manager on which NixOS is based. These provide a declarative approach to configuration management with many advantages to users, such as strong reproducibility and atomic upgrades and rollbacks.

  • Ansible’s View on IT Automation

    Michael DeHaan, creator of Ansible, introduces the general-purpose IT automation system. He describes the tool’s guiding principles: simplicity, ease of use and maximum security. The philosophy behind its community is also discussed, including the importance of Ansible’s plugin-based model. Michael uses a simple but common scenario to demonstrate Ansible.

  • Exploring the ENTIRE DevOps Toolchain for (Cloud) Teams

    When assessing technology that empowers a DevOps transformation, it’s easy to focus in on the headline capabilities (“configuration management!”) and miss out on the bigger picture. How can teams shipping cloud (or on-premises) applications use the full suite of DevOps technologies to simplify delivery and management at scale? This article classifies and explains key enabling technologies.

  • Reliable Auto-Scaling using Feedback Control

    Philipp K. Janert explains how to reliably auto-scale systems using a reactive approach based on feedback control which provides a more accurate solution than deterministic or rule-based ones.

  • Book Review: Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef - Second Edition

    The second edition of Stephen Nelson-Smith's book "Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef" covers the principles behind "Infrastructure as Code", provides an introduction to Ruby, Chef, and important Tools. The main part consists of detailed examples on how to use the tools required to write fully tested infrastructure code.

  • Monty Taylor and Jim Blair on CI and Test Automation at OpenStack

    Monty Taylor and James Blair talk about the build and test challenges they face at OpenStack, and how they managed to tackle them. Managing hundreds of VMs on public clouds, integrating up to 400 commits a day and running thousands of test jobs on them are some of the challenges described.

  • The Perfect Dev/Test Lab: 10 Principles that make it Possible

    Software that drives the business typically takes inordinate amounts of time to develop and test. Now with new technologies able to normalize the private and public clouds the ultimate software development lab is not only feasible but cost-effective as well. To achieve hyper-agile software development, here are key principles for building the next-gen dev/test lab of enterprise DevOps’ dreams.

  • DevOps @ large investment bank

    This article is part of the “DevOps War Stories” series. In each issue we hear what DevOps brings to a different organisation, we learn what worked and what didn’t, and chart the challenges faced during adoption. This time a very personal story on introducing a DevOps mindset at a large bank. In particular how the automation of configuration and release management processes enabled collaboration.

  • Writing Automated Tests with Jazz Automation

    Jazz Automation is a testing framework built to automate and speed up acceptance/functional testing for all types of web based systems or static websites and in any industry. It also lends itself to easily implement automated integration testing. Historically this type of testing has been all manual, labor intensive, and inaccurate.

  • Interview and Book Review: Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook

    Matthias Marschall contributes powerful tactical information for all users of Opscode Chef, from the beginner up to expert, in his recently published book "Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook". Beginners will gain progressive knowledge using open source tools and free services. The expert will find a starting point automating the configuration of production applications in data centers.

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