Year: 2016

Rundeck – Job Scheduler and Runbook Automation

Rundeck-EditJob

Rundeck is yet another one of those services that I want to get my hands on but haven’t yet got the time to.  The simplest way to describe it is: cron on steroids.

Rundeck allows one to define the commands and then allow for execution on those commands manually, periodically or based on a certain trigger.  Imagine, for example, a deployment command that needs to run across some servers to which you are not comfortable giving access to developers, or even non-technical users.  You can create a command in Rundeck and give access to certain users to execute it, via clicking a button or two in a user friendly web interface.

A side benefit to using Rundeck versus cron are the metrics.  Rundeck collects metrics like successful and failed executions, execution times, etc.  So it makes it easier for you to see that certain jobs are getting progressively slower or fail on specific weekdays, etc.

The best part is that Rundeck is Open Source and self-hosted, so you don’t need to give sensitive access to some external web service.

Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09

amazon ami 2016.09

AWS Blog lets us know that Amazon Linux AMI 2016.09 is now available.  It comes with a variety of updates, such as Nginx 1.10, PHP 7, and PostgreSQL 9.5 and Python 3.5.  Another thing that got quite a bit of improvement is the boot time of the Amazon Linux AMI instances.  Here’s a comparison chart:

amazon-linux-ami-launch-time-2016-09-whiteboard

Read about all the changes in the release notes.

P.S.: I’m still stuck with Amazon AMI on a few of my instances, but in general I have to remind all of you to NOT use the Amazon AMI.  You’ve been warned.

Vim 8.0 Released!

The team behind the greatest text editor of all times has release the new major version – Vim 8.0.  It’s the first major release in 10 years!  Brief overview of the changes:

  • Asynchronous I/O support, channels, JSON
  • Jobs
  • Timers
  • Partials, Lambdas and Closures
  • Packages
  • New style testing
  • Viminfo merged by timestamp
  • GTK+ 3 support
  • MS-Windows DirectX support

For a more complete list and details, have a look here.

The TL;DR summary: Vim provides a lot more power now to plugin developers, so we’ll be seeing a boost in both new functionality and old ways getting better.

Here is a mandatory Slashdot discussion with your usual Vim vs. Emacs flame.

P.S.: Emacs has recently released a major update too …