This post offers a small taste of Dutch history but, more importantly, an overview of how to user Azure DevOps to create a CI Pipeline for Hugo!

Terraform has gained a lot of popularity in the last couple years. Rackspace prefers to use Terraform to quickly spin up new architecture in AWS and Azure. However, with Amazon's lightning-fast deployment of new features, it has become harder for the Provider maintainers to keep up. Developers are left waiting for new features to be developed and merged into the master branch before becoming available for general consumption.

Ansible development is fast, and anyone using Ansible extensively has most likely come across an instance where a playbook that used to work does not work on a later Ansible version. Or, a system that wasn't supported initially is now added and an existing role requires modification to make it work on the new system. See Molecule for Ansible role creation for more details on using and debugging Molecule. Creating a Molecule scenario to test an existing role allows for easy testing and modification of that role with all the benefits that Molecule provides.

In our Quality Engineering organization, we create, configure, and destroy a lot of servers via automation. Ansible is a great method for handling the configuration of servers, but the creation of Ansible roles and playbooks can be trial and error for even experienced Operations Engineers. Molecule provides a way to speed up the development and confidence of Ansible roles and playbooks by wrapping a virtualization driver with tools for testing and linting.

Using Terraform with Rackspace Public Cloud

Handling a huge scale of infrastructure requires automation and infrastructure as code. Terraform is a tool that helps to manage a wide variety of systems including dynamic server lifecycle, configuration of source code repositories, databases, and even monitoring services. Terraform uses text configuration files to define the desired state of infrastructure. From those files, Terraform provides information on the changes to be made based on the current state of that infrastructure, and can make those changes.

Modern application environments can be complex and include many discrete elements that can all affect the end user's experience. Because of this, it can be challenging to develop an effective monitoring strategy that allows you to be alerted during potential performance problems and also to use these metrics from a variety of systems to proactively address potential bottlenecks and slow points before they cause end user impact. In this article, we'll be discussing several best practices for ensuring that your environment is effectively monitored.

Long running threads, application locks, thread contention, and other problems can all cause significant performance problems in Java applications (up to and including a complete lock up of the Java Virtual Machine (or JVM)!) Thread dumps are a vital tool in analyzing and troubleshooting performance problems in Java applications. They represent a point-in-time snapshot of the stack traces for all active threads that exist within the JVM. Typically, in order to troubleshoot these issues and get to the root cause, an engineer takes several thread dumps approximately 5-15 seconds apart. In this way, we can compare the state of all threads to determine commonalities -- namely, threads that are long running, blocking other threads, leading to circular deadlocks, and so on. In large applications, you may have thousands of threads, which can make this analysis a challenging prospect. In this article, we'll discuss how we can use a tool called fastthread.io in order to offload most of the heavy lifting and give us immediate insight in to the state of the application threads.

Rackspace Application Services provides application support and management to a wide variety of customers ranging in size from small environments with only a few application servers to customers that run thousands of Java Virtual Machines (or JVMs) across their environment. To help facilitate this, we heavily rely on Ansible to help us automate implementation, troubleshooting, and maintenance tasks. While Ansible is quite powerful and easy to use, many organizations do not take full advantage of some of the features that it provides. In this article, we'll be discussing how you can extend Jinja2 and Ansible's built-in filter plugins and how you can craft a completely new filter plugin to make specific tasks easier.

Last year, we shared the foundation Rackspace uses for Sitecore security hardening in a blog on this site. We're due for an update now that Sitecore has published additional best practices, and, here at Rackspace, we've folded those recommendations into our PowerShell process for securing environments. The Rackspace Managed Services for Sitecore team incorporates this into our provisioning work program for enterprise Sitecore projects.

As more web application workloads move to the cloud, organizations need to be concerned about attacks from the internet. External threats are scanning public IP ranges to find known vulnerabilities and exploit businesses. Let's take a look at the Azure Application Gateway (WAF), and see how it can be a part of our toolset for protecting our web applications.

Azure SQL is Microsoft's answer to Platform as a Service for SQL Server. It extracts a lot of the day to day administrative tasks of managing an installation. Let’s take a look how a consumer of Azure SQL can export data to restore to a local on-premise installation.

With Azure App Service, backing up your web app is available depending which App Service plan is choosen. With the introduction of larger applications moving to the cloud, certain files or folders do not need backed up. This is not something an end user can do in the Azure portal, so let's investigate how we can accomplish filtering of files or folders during the backup process.

As we've discussed in previous posts, AppDynamics is a powerful Application Performance Management (APM) tool that can be used to help tune performance in your application. However, with many organizations adopting a CI/CD approach to their application development lifecycle, it can be difficult to determine how these frequent deployments are affecting application performance and end-user experience.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools can provide incredibly valuable insight into the performance of your applications and ultimately your end users' experience. This insight, however, does not come without its cost. Because APM tools instrument code at runtime, there is always some level of performance overhead. In contrast to some older APM tools, modern APM tools are designed to minimize the negative performance impact as much as possible to allow you to safely run them in production without your end users' experience suffering. In this post, we'll evaluate the overhead introduced on an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) environment by two popular APM tools: AppDynamics and New Relic

You may have found the extensions tab when browsing in an Azure Web App. Selecting extensions to add to an application is as easy as just pointing and clicking. Moving outside of the portal to an ARM template, things get a little bit tricky because documentation is lacking.

If you are using Microsoft® Azure® Blob Storage and have a heavy workload, here's something you can do to improve performance that the majority of people are not doing - pay attention to the name you use for an Azure storage account.

Sitecore has the option of making use of TempDB in Sql Server to speed up your session state operations. What catches people off guard is the fact that tempdb is recreated at service restart of SQL Server. This becomes a problem when you have to recreate the table structure and user permissions inside tempdb.

Security Hardening for Sitecore Environments

We in the Rackspace Managed Services for Sitecore team work with a variety of enterprise Sitecore projects. Part of our implementation routine is to complete "security hardening" for Sitecore, which means applying the set of published security best-practices from Sitecore.

Out-of-the-box, Sitecore installs a demo-friendly and developer-ready solution; this is not a configuration suitable for running in production, on many grounds, but our focus here is on security aspects . . . so let's examine the specific Sitecore security hardening recommendations (Sitecore Security Hardening documentation) each in turn and share how we, at Rackspace, apply the recommendations.

Where do you conduct your User Acceptance Testing (UAT) activities? It's a loaded question that many organizations have challenges addressing as they first need to obtain a clear definition of what what UAT is (and what it isn't) before they even consider where UAT activities should occur. The benefits of a properly instituted UAT environment far outweigh the challenges, and the danger of not having one, but success requires a thoughtful and purposeful approach.

AppDynamics is a powerful Application Performance Management tool that, properly configured, can provide tremendous insight in to application and infrastructure performance bottlenecks and enable operations and development teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues. Although AppDynamics collects and measures application performance data out of the box, some configuration and customization is necessary in order to reach its full capabilities. This guide explains best practices around how to identify your application's critical business transactions in order to get the most out of AppDynamics and, ultimately, the most out of your application and infrastructure.

Using the Azure diagnostic extension lets you capture a good set of metrics to help trend and diagnose your virtual machine. What a lot of people don't know is that you can configure it to capture custom log files.

Automation in Windows has historically been a challenge due to lack of built in tools for remote management. In the past few years, the enhancements to PowerShell and WinRM (Windows Remote Management) have forged a path that is now more on par with other operating systems in regards to remote access.

Sitecore implementations with Content Delivery nodes in multiple locations must keep their databases and content in sync. The Sitecore Scaling Guide summarizes areas of concern, such as isolating CM and CD servers, enabling the Sitecore scalability settings, maintaining search indexes, etc. Sitecore runs on top of SQL Server, and one topic touched on in the Scaling Guide is SQL Server replication, and conveniently there is a Sitecore guide just for that specific subject. This guide explains how, with SQL Server Merge Replication, one can coordinate the content of Sitecore databases that are not in the same location. This is the starting point for what we at Rackspace have found to be a global publishing architecture that meets the needs of enterprise Sitecore customers.

I previously made a blog post on how to manually setup Sitecore running in a Docker container. I would like to take it one more step and build a Docker image using an automated install of Sitecore during the build process. We can then build Sitecore development enviornments on demand using our Docker Sitecore image.

Here's PoshStack

OpenStack SDKs exist for several programming languages, including Python, Go, Ruby, and many more. For those who don't wish to write code, users in the *nix world can use Curl at the command line to perform operations.

What about Microsoft Windows administrators? Are they required to learn linux and bash and curl? What if they could use the skills they already have, or learn new skills that are native to the Windows environment, for OpenStack administration? Is there a command line or scripting tool that suits the Windows DevOps world?

A question that often comes up is "why should I use config management when I can just use images?" In this article, we’ll explore the differences between images and configuration management, and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each.