Hello World!

Hello World!

And that takes care of tradition. Welcome to The Full Stacky. The name of this blog is clearly a play on The Full Monty. The Full Monty is a splendid film and may give you a bit of advance insight into what to expect here. Just like Gaz and the boys we have a goal and we'll be doing the needful to achieve that. Sometimes it won't be pretty but it'll usually be entertaining. We'll be learning a lot on the way and we'll be letting it all hang out.. within the bounds of good taste.

Full Stack in the industry has a special meaning. For developers we refer to various solution stacks (such as LAMP Stack which consists of  Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python). Wikipedia has a good overview of the common solution stacks at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solution_stack. A Full Stack Developer (capitals definitely required) is an individual who is conversant in every element of the solution stack of choice.

Being a Full Stack Developer requires a good breadth of skills and depending on the complexity and range of the stack they are rare... unicorn rare in some cases. Lots of articles have been written on the necessity, and the myth, of the full stack developer. Go forth and enjoy. Start with this one since it's humorous: http://andyshora.com/full-stack-developers.html

Almost there... I'm not all that developer-y anymore. I did my Computer Science at Purdue and then went out into the real world and discovered that I really enjoyed networking just a little more. Time passes and virtualization becomes the new hotness. With an explosion of servers comes better management and tools so we start getting into configuration management. Tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, etc... allow for configuration of servers using a bit of code. Uh oh.. headed back to developer land. In recent days this trend is headed full blown into a little paradigm known as "Infrastructure as Code" where we manage and provision our computing infrastructure (bare-metal servers, virtual servers, networking, etc.) using code. Very, very cool. And that's my stack.

I'll be touching on configuration management tools (or "Continuous Configuration Automation" (CCA) Tools using current buzz-nacular), Cloud computing, security, applicable hardware and, since Infrastructure as Code is a key best practice for DevOps, we'll definitely be delving into DevOps.

I'm about to begin a production implementation of OpenStack (private cloud) so I expect the next several posts will focus entirely in that direction. Stay tuned...