System Management Survey

Survey form - for taking surveys ;-)

If you manage, secure, or plan for IT environments or DevOps, we’d love for you to take our System Management survey. Right now, we’re busy planning on how to make the Assimilation Suite better in 2016. Your responses will be a huge help in giving us a sharp focus on how best to improve IT management for you and others in the IT community. If you can help us out, we’ll send you a small token of our appreciation

Simplicity Is King

We fill our lives with things designed to make them easier… In many cases, these things we get to make our lives easier wind up making it more complex. Nowhere is this more apparent than in IT. We have so many choices of ways to create services, to deploy them, and to manage them. I’ve been extensively involved with high-availability work since 1998. One of my mantras in high-availability is “Complexity is the Enemy of Reliability” – and so it is. If you add parts to a thing, more things will fail – period. In high-availability, we add high-availability software – which makes it more complex, and hence less reliable. But we get something back instead – improved availability.

How IT Administrators get better by contributing to Open Source Projects

I’ve been asked to give the keynote address at the 2015 Cascadia IT conference. For my keynote, I’d like to tell stories of their contributions – large and small – and how they helped and how they were uniquely valuable. Although I have a number of stories of how various IT admins (system, network, security, etc.) have contributed to my projects (Linux-HA/Pacemaker and the Assimilation Project), I’m looking for more. This post is a request to send me your stories of how IT admins have contributed to open source projects in large or small ways.

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