WorldTurner Blog

Stateless computing as I see it

Stateless computing has had some press coverage in the past. What it means to me is that you don't deliver your software as some package that you need to install on a computer, but rather as the entire configuration of the computer as a whole. Let me describe what the advantages are and what you need to do to achieve it.

Posted at 07:59PM Mar 06, 2011 by Erwin Bolwidt in DevOps  |  Comments[2]

Ruby disk utilities - partition editor

In my previous blog post, I described how I was able to create a bootable disk image with a Ubuntu installation, without any manual intervention. Although that was a good first step, I don't consider this an end-result as the shell scripts that I used weren't very error-tolerant or configurable. My next goal is to create a ruby script that can perform these steps, and also pick up where it left of if an error was encountered. As part of this, I am creating a library of utilities related to disk management.

Posted at 10:03AM Feb 20, 2011 by Erwin Bolwidt in DevOps  |  Comments[0]

Creating a bootable virtual appliance, fully automated

I was looking for a way to create a VMWare image in an automated way, without actually having to start VMWare to make the image.

I can much easier integrate such a process into an automated build than if I actually have to start VMWare, and I'm not even sure if I can entirely automate an OS installation inside VMWare.

The goal is to include the building of deployable machine images into the continuous integration process, and to be able to recreate exactly the same machine configuration without having to worry what changes may have been made by hand.

Many steps turned out te be relatively straightforward since people already figured this out or even created tools for the step. However, making the image bootable using Grub 2 was a major challenge for me, and I couldn't find any resource on the Internet that described how to do this.

Posted at 11:45AM Feb 04, 2011 by Erwin Bolwidt in DevOps  |  Comments[0]