Moving on - linux etc

It's now been more than 18 months since I last posted anything here.  The danger is, of course, that the amount I've done in the meantime means I can never catch up.  This is just an attempt to move past that, and hopefully allow me to get some more down that I want to record.

A very brief history since my last post

My client has a large number of development projects, but when I started had only one SIT and one UAT environment. These were traditionally hosted, and very expensive. My initial task was to try and build a second sit environment in AWS.

The core portal consisted of a number of Linux servers, with mostly Java applications deployed on jboss. It took some time to appreciate the size and complexity of the system. In addition, there were a number of services running on Windows servers, but fortunately I did not, initially, have any involvement in this, and they were also not initially included in our environments. I also didn't have more than the minimum involvement in the Oracle servers behind all of this.

It was also immediately clear that the actual requirement would be for multiple dev and test environments. This means the build process needed to be automated.

The production environment would almost certainly not be migrated to public cloud in at least the medium term. That means that too much reliance on cloud native services would prevent any automation applying to production. Where there is no conflict, native aws services could be used, and hopefully we could use more in future.

I evaluated a number of solutions before deciding on Ansible as the tool of choice. 

In time, our small team took over responsibility for live support of the production web portal. In time we got to rebuild and migrate the live system to a new data centre. By this time we could do the complete build, configuration and deployment of almost 80 servers in 40 distinct roles using Ansible.

The key technologies I've now been using over the past while therefore include:

Linux

Aws

Ansible

Java applications

Apache

VMware

Windows server (also SQL and SSIS)

Hopefully more coming soon.