Last time, we had refactored our basic one-line install of StackStorm and our custom pack into an Ansible playbook. The Ansible playbook works well enough on its own but still requires us to already have a server setup for Ansible to execute the playbook on. What if we didn't need that pre-existing server and were able to on-the-fly provision one for our playbook? This arena is where Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) initiatives really shine and where I would now like to introduce BitOps.
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DevOps
This is the second part in a StackStorm tutorial series:
- Part 1: DevOps Automation using StackStorm - Getting Started
- Part 2: DevOps Automation using StackStorm- Deploying with Ansible
- Part 3: DevOps Automation using StackStorm - Cloud Deployment via BitOps
- Part 4: DevOps Automation using StackStorm - BitOps Secrets Management
To complete this tutorial you will need:
- ansible
- A Linux server with basic internet connectivity
If you prefer skipping ahead to the final solution, the code created in this tutorial is on Github.
Dylan Lundquist
DevOps 
Last Updated: December 01, 2022
Terraform is one of the best tools for provisioning cloud infrastructure, but when working with virtual machines lacks good support for SSH'ing on to the server to configure it. This is where Ansible shines.
Passing the output of Terraform in to Ansible is not a documented process, so we'll be looking at a practical example using Terraform to create an AWS EC2 instance and configure NGINX on it with Ansible. The whole process will be orchestrated using BitOps - an open source deployment tool that bundles and runs terraform and ansible executables.
Connor Graham
DevOps
Event driven
DevOps automation is a concept based around listening for desired events and then performing a task in response. There are a wide variety of applications for the event driven 'cause and effect' relationship in both personal and enterprise environments.
In the home, upon returning from shopping when your cellphone is detected on the network, you may want your WiFi enabled lights to come on automatically to a desired brightness depending on the time of day.
In the office, when a crucial system's data store is reaching capacity we may want to send an alert and create a Jira ticket to track remediation.
The question remains, how, or what do we use to 'listen' for these events?
Enter, StackStorm.
Dylan Lundquist
Angular 
Component inheritance in Angular is a feature that doesn’t seem to get a lot of love. Maybe it’s the tie to object-oriented programming which is losing a little love to the functional programming trend. However, I’ve found component inheritance to be just the right fit for a number of use-cases.
Jonathan Spickerman
DevOps 
Depends on who you ask
DevOps is notoriously difficult, even controversial, to define.
Indeed, there are so many definitions of DevOps that if you ask 10 people, “What is DevOps”, you’re likely to get more than 10 answers (opensource.com).
DevOps is a broad concept that covers many areas of expertise, so it might have a different definition depending on a person’s background or point of view.
In this post, we’ll look at a few definitions of DevOps to see if they are actually describing different pieces of the same beast.
Mick McGrath
DevOps
BitOps is an open source Docker image created by Bitovi that bundles popular deployment tools with the understanding of what to do with an operations repository. This coupling makes it easier than ever to set up the automated deployment of cloud infrastructure. However, BitOps requires an operations repository to work its magic.
This is part 2 of a BitOps tutorial series:
Connor Graham