(This article was originally published on The Agile Admin, as part of their "Docker and the Future of Configuration Management" series.)

My name is Nathaniel Eliot, and I’ve worked extensively in software deployment over the last several years. I have worked on two automation frameworks around Chef: Ironfan, an open-source cluster management system ( Read more... )

I received in my inbox this morning a passionate plea from you:

Dear temujin9,

As an online shopper, you may be negatively affected by sales tax legislation currently being considered in the U.S. Congress. I want to let you know about the bill and give you a . . .

::snip for SPAM and whinging::I know crowd-sourcing is all the rage these days, ( Read more... )

This was once taken as proven fact, and it's still a core of many software company's money-making plans, even those which produce large and respected open source products. The theory goes that people will pay for those extra bits, but not if we make it completely free and accessible. When it was ubiquitous, that was true, because there were no good ( Read more... )

(Originally posted on the Less Wrong thread "Who Wants To Start An Important Startup?"I work for a start-up, and I've worked for a number of them over the years. While it's been some of the best and most fulfilling work I've done, there are several things you need to consider ( Read more... )

"The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it. In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists ( Read more... )

I started with you back when you were del.icio.us. Then Yahoo bought you. Then they sold you. Then you started making bad changes: removing fully-functional interfaces and replacing them with cheap substitutes that often don't work as advertised ( Read more... )

A virtual stranger I know ( Read more... )

My daughter Iliana was born into crisis. Her continued good-cheer in the center of that kept many of us relatively sane, in the midst of her mother's decline. She's been a tiny anchor, keeping me from forgetting my place in the world when a part of me wanted nothing more than to cut adrift ( Read more... )

I did an Ignite talk at DevOpsDays Austin on the culture that makes Infochimps work, and they asked me to expand into a blog post.Infochimps uses many cutting edge tools (Chef, Amazon Web Services, Hadoop, Hbase, ElasticSearch, Flume, MongoDB, Phantom.js, etc. ad nauseum), and we’ve written a number of custom tools to help corral these sometimes ( Read more... )

This post was originally written for Infochimps, as a response to a GigaOm editorial titled "Is It Too Late For OpenStack?"Prognostication seems to be all the rage again this week. Allow me to polish the crystal ball, and take a look into our cloudy future ( Read more... )