I thought I’d start off my first blog post with a book review on DevOps for the Desperate

The book is aimed at giving software engineers a glimpse at the tooling surrounding modern devOps. It’s not going to make you an expert, think more along the lines of generalist.

The book covers topics including Linux Administration, VMs, Containerization, Ansible and server monitoring.

I enjoyed playing around with creating an Ubuntu docker container and enhancing its security via ansible. This was a slight hack compared to his example which relied on using Vagrant to create a VM instead of a container.

Despite having used ansible at work for several years, it was intriguing to discover the privilaged escalation that can be inserted into playbooks as seen below:

---
- name: Provision VM
  hosts: all
  become: yes
  become_method: sudo
  remote_user: ubuntu
---

This was handy for a project I’m working on where I need to run sudo cmds on a daily basis on a remote server. More on this https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/become.html

FROM ubuntu:latest

RUN apt update && apt install  openssh-server sudo -y
RUN useradd -rm -d /home/ubuntu -s /bin/bash -g root -G sudo -u 1000 test
RUN  echo 'test:test' | chpasswd

RUN service ssh start

There is a wealth of unix command info covered in the book. To name a few:

  • strace
  • awk
  • sed

as well as info on unix logging e.g /var/log/dmesg

In summary I’d give this book 5* for an inspiring read on how to automate and upskill your devOps activities.

I love NoStarch book covers :)

Incidentally, whilst reading this book I came across the windows terminal. I highly recommend switching to this for any terminal needs you have when on windows.