Flip Side of the Coin: Automation Tools of the Trade

In my last post I started the discussion on the tools of the trade for automation and orchestration. The post mainly focused on Microsoft PowerShell as one of the primary tools of the trade when working within Microsoft, VMware and Citrix virtualization and orchestration solutions. One of the main reasons that I focused on Microsoft PowerShell. So why PowerShell? Quite simply it is a very powerful platform that has a very strong community to help support it and companies outside of Microsoft have invested a great deal of time and development to use this technology as one of the main administration and management platforms for working with VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen. For the sake of this discussion, I am going to refer to PowerShell as one side of the automation coin and now concentrate on the flip side of the automation coin.

EMCworld Announcements

There were quite a number of interesting announcements at EMCworld this year. The most important is that the Dell-EMC merger is on track to complete its reorganization as Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies will join the ranks of the largest hardware and software vendors worldwide. EMC also announced several new hardware options and software services, and …

The New OpenStack: Collaboration

At this year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, the message was clear. OpenStack needs to pivot from a science experiment to a production system. Even though this is happening, it has been happening slowly. Some would argue that it has been achieved for the likes of PayPal and other extremely large institutions, such as AT&T. However, running, configuring, and …

A Look at Automation Tools of the Trade

A look at automation tools of the trade. In my last post, I spent a little time talking about the difference between automation, which is the automated task or scripted solution to perform a task, and orchestration, which is the complete process and then top it all off with how DevOps is a philosophy behind the orchestration. For this post I want to focus in on the some of the most common tools of the trade behind the automation and orchestration for the different types of environments.