Over the last week, due to the awesomeness that was PuppetConf, I’ve met with a lot of people including a lot of teams who wanted to talk about both DevOps and Puppet. Quite a lot of those teams described themselves as the “DevOps” team or as “DevOps Engineers”. I largely belong to the school of thought that titles are largely bollocks.1 I also firmly believe DevOps is about doing IT differently rather than being a “role” in and of itself.

I’ve just gotten back from New Mexico. I’d not ever been through there before. Indeed of the states nearby I’ve really only been through Nevada and flown into Phoenix a few times. For this visit, we flew into Albuquerque and then drove 80 odd miles down to a small town called Socorro. We were headed to a job fair at New Mexico Technical Institute.1 Driving through New Mexico is downright pretty.

Kestrel is a neat little distributed message queue based on “starling” I’ve been playing with. Like all things I take a look at I added a Puppet report processor that sends logs from Puppet to Kestrel. The report processor is also on the Forge as a module. It’s simple to install and use, all you need is Puppet and the kestrel-client gem. Install the kestrel-client gem on your Puppet master

The field of SAAS server monitoring services has expanded again. This time with the addition of CopperEgg. I took a quick look at the service which allows with uptime monitoring via external ping and cloud monitoring. They also integrate with Puppet to provide automatic installation and management of their monitoring client which is a neat feature. I made some updates to their Puppet module and added support for a Puppet type and provider for their uptime monitoring API.

I really don’t care where most candidates went to school, nor overly much what they studied, nor the results they got at school. I judge candidates on what they write, say and produce. Sadly, many younger candidates lead their applications with their education rather than themselves. In my view, this does them a disservice when applying for roles. This is not to say that I don’t think getting into a good school and getting good grades isn’t a potential indicator of a promising employee.