[chef] Re: Bring up the discussion for knife-ec2 --node-name-prefix option

[Brad Knowles < >]

On Oct 21, 2012, at 7:56 PM, Sascha Bates 
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 wrote:

> And if we lived in a perfect world, I'm sure we'd never need to ssh 
> anywhere and could just sit in the middle of an interactive matrix like 
> Tony Stark.  Regardless, this is an active development environment and we 
> are in and out of Jenkins slaves and development team VMs, and just 
> generally being the diagnostic fixit guys.  The information doesn't always 
> come to you. Sometimes you have to go to the information. And while I get a 
> lot of information from the Jenkins GUI, sometimes there's no substitute 
> for going out and looking at something.

Just because you don't live in a perfect world is no reason to avoid working 
towards making your world more perfect.

Each time you have to manually ssh out to a given node to find or fix some 
problem, you should be asking yourself what you can do to help make this 
information available through other -- more automated -- means.  The next 
time you have to do that same sort of thing, you should be asking yourself 
that same question again.  By the third or fourth time, you should probably 
be working towards having something in place to do that instead so that there 
is unlikely to be a fifth or sixth time, at least for that particular type of 
problem.

You don't want to go around manually doing all the same sorts of things every 
time, because that doesn't leave you any room to be able to scale your 
infrastructure, or react to successfully handle serious problems.  That 
probably also would not be conducive to your mental or physical health, 
either.


You don't have to have everything automated, everywhere, from Day One.  But 
you should at least work towards the goal of having the right things 
automated in the right way -- and for the right reasons.

> Or possibly I'm the only person who doesn't work in a perfect world. 
> Everyone else, back to your regularly scheduled Ironman Matrix.

Speaking only for myself, it's unlikely to be like Iron Man.  It's more 
likely to be like Edison -- 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, and learning 
many thousands of different ways to *not* make a lightbulb.  But there will 
hopefully be a few interesting/useful inventions and discoveries along the 
way.

I just hope we can have better working conditions, and avoid getting into 
nasty politics and lawsuits, etc... over who invented what and whose version 
of which thing is really the better thing.

--
Brad Knowles 
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LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>