Yujin Kim's blog

While it’s an old news that google wave is being phased out, it appears that google has miscalculated the launch of this potentially game changing product and is also killing it prematurely. What’s new is that Google just opened up the service for Google App for business, and this google wave could have been a very effective way to communicate in the workspace. My boss Rajiv has been a strong proponent of using real time chat for operation management (see Benefits of Using Real-Time Group Chat (IRC) in Technology Operations Management)

With google adding the service to the google application for business offerings, it would have been easier to adopt the corporate users (that is if the corporate is allowing to set up one of the domains with google app) and allow corporate users to “wave” the conversation for various technology operations such as releases, troubleshooting, or even corporate events.

Focusing on the troubleshooting, it’s pretty common that if you are on a troubleshooting bridge, whenever a new person joins the call, oftentimes, the person managing the call has to provide the status updates, and that often could be somewhat distracting to the people who are investigating the issue as it disrupts the flow and conversation that had been taken place. Wave could have been a great solution for 1) providing the history of the threads 2) allowing private conversation without interrupting the group calls and 3) providing a very complete tracking of the issues at hand. This product could have been hence integrated with many Runbook Automation systems, as well as google search engine and would have allowed a room for a birth of fairly interesting correlation engine using google’s sophisticated search algorithm. After all, Wave could have replaced mailing list archive, forums, and any support type Q&As or FAQs – which is pretty much all the stack exchange type sites are doing these days anyway.

I wish google have waited a bit longer before announcing the end of the product, as I believe many would have found a good use out of it. Rather, Google might have been caught up too much on the social aspect of it. Most likely Google will find a way to utilize the code base in some other way and perhaps they will think of a way to target corporate/SMB market first next time.

It’s been a bit while since the term DevOps has created some sort of buzz around the IT world. While still not widely adopted, it is gaining quite a bit of momentum, and the company I work is not an exception to this. We have been making steady improvements to adopt various concepts of devops, including built automation, employing puppet, automating documentations and such.

I believe much of the focus is on comparing the traditional system engineers and the “devops” type engineers. While I have no disagreement on this concept, I think the role of devops also plays an important and positive role to the development team. Many senior software engineers are often very good architect with good understanding of infrastructure. At work, I have had a great honor working with very talented people who just haven’t had a chance to go through some of the processes involved in troubleshooting applications – such as reading thread dumps, analyzing heap dumps, using profilers, or even reading AWR reports, or even some of the commonly used system level debugging tools such as vmstat, iostat, strace/dtrace, etc.

As much as DevOps are helping bridging the gap between software engineers and operations, it can also help software engineers gain more experience or knowledge around those tools and in a way influence software engineers to learn how to think like operation people do. This can only make the software engineers become better architects and make them equipped with troubleshooting knowledges.

I have been involved in various kind of interesting and challenging troubleshooting of application/infrastructure issues with other engineers(both software and system). It has given me understand the applications much better and allow me to suggest code improvements, and software engineers giving my team feedbacks on what can be better on operation wise. It also has given some of the software engineers exposures to the above mentioned tools that allowed them to be able to diagnose the applications before the code gets deployed to production systems.

While the world is not a perfect place, I do really believe that devops movement is providing positive influence to the development team, and vice versa. The true value of devops, IMHO, is reinforcing the fact that every one is providing service to the same client in the end. In other words, from clients eyes, it’s really the technology department that’s providing what they need, and not software engineering team or the operation team.

Bottom line: devops is really about creating a culture, and a mindset that we are all in this together and let’s work it out together.

I just spent the cold Sataurday evening staying at home and installed Ubuntu on my old G5 dual cpu Power Mac PPC.

I was hoping to install Fedora 12 but Fedora unfortunately wasn’t able to recognize HFS+ file system very well (which was apparent when I looked at fdisk).  Installing Fedora using the GUI came pretty close but it didn’t know how to install bootloader. I also was going to try OpenSuse but overall impression I got was ubuntu has the better support (since it’s community driven.) BTW, I installed the server edition knowing I wanted this box to just act as a server for puppet and other things.

Anyhow, this post is just to keep track of the changes I’ve made

Also installed ddclient for dyndns.

Updated the network interface to have static ip

I’m now working on getting S3 storage set up so I can back up stuff there.

http://xentek.net/articles/448/installing-fuse-s3fs-and-sshfs-on-ubuntu/