Setting your knife.rb cookbook_path to match your cookbook locations

Always make sure you set your cookbook_path in knife.rb to something that makes sense for your working environment. People often get confused by how/where the ‘knife’ command is finding cookbooks during commands like “knife cookbook upload” or even “knife cookbooks create.” I remember when I first leaned Chef, I would type “knife cookbook create foo_book” […]

Read more
Parameter Passing in a Build Flow

As a direct followup to my previous post, I thought the discussion of passing parameters in a build flow might be useful. Let’s start with our previous example.  I’ve created a build flow that deploys an application and runs Front-End, Back-End and Integration Tests against that application in parallel.  In addition, we’ve added several features […]

Read more
Using a Build Flow for Deployments and Functional Testing

Jenkins is a powerful tool in your Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery toolbox.  For my last clients over the past several years, we have utilized Jenkins to deploy software and preform automated testing.  One of the most powerful tools I have used to orchestrate deployments and testing has been the Build Flow Plugin.  It has allowed […]

Read more
The Production Issue

If you’ve been working in software development then you’re probably very familiar with the term “production issue”.  This is a problem that is discovered in the production environment that causes the application to become unavailable or to exhibit incorrect behavior.  For example, a production issue in an online banking system might be that customers’ account […]

Read more
From Naivety to Negligence

I understand the plight of senior executives, I really do.  Most don’t have a software background and that makes it difficult for them to fully understand application security.  But when security breeches are caused by basic, simple code vulnerabilities that can be found using readily available tools, it makes me wonder how serious businesses even […]

Read more
Getting Recorded Selenium Scripts Running In Sauce

Introduction As mobile native app testing tools continue to advance at a slow pace, mobile web app testing tools are advancing much quicker. There are several out there, including Sauce Labs and Testing Bot. These tools are great at taking browser based tests, and running them on emulated mobile devices, or even different desktop OS […]

Read more
A Maturity Matrix for Continuous Delivery Pipelines

I’ve worked on a number of DevOps projects recently where I’ve had to assemble Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines to build, deploy, and test software. In my case, we’ve been using Chef to automatically deploy various components of a java-based web system using Jenkins. We have a lot of pipeline job chains created in Jenkins to […]

Read more
Pitfalls of Overlapping Releases

On my current project, new functionality is often released in increments over a period of several months, as opposed to developing the functionality and deploying it in one release. This is a good approach to release management because it reduces risk, since relatively small changes will be made to the production environment. It also allows […]

Read more
What does Berkshelf do for me?

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Chef and Berkshelf over the last few years. I started in a world without Berkshelf and wrote a conglomeration of spaghetti cookbooks that had a mess of dependencies and were very difficult to maintain. Eventually, I bit the bullet and started using Berkshelf 2.0 to manage my […]

Read more
Coveros Partners with InfoZen on USCIS Transformation Integration Award

Coveros Partners with InfoZen on USCIS Transformation Integration Award Program will accelerate delivery of USCIS software projects Loudoun County, VA, August 28, 2014 — Coveros, Inc., the market leader in secure software development, today announced that it has partnered with InfoZen on the contract that was awarded 10/22/2013 with the performance start date of 2/4/2014 […]

Read more
X