Hey! I'm Ben.
I'm a deployment automation engineer living in Salt Lake City, Utah. I'm currently interested in deploying web applications into orchestrated container platforms. My main tool for this is Jenkins. Essentially our developers deploy their code by committing their code changes to certain git branches. A great tool built into Git called Git Hooks allows us to tell a continuous integration tool like Jenkins that changes have been made. Jenkins is great because it will automatically build the project, check for errors, and if the build succeeds deploy it to your test, prod, etc environments. We can work on optimizing our project and build processes in a very controlled way using this method.Lately, I've been working on using this process to deploy to containers. It started with deploying with Docker, building Dockerfiles or docker-compose.yml files with a project and deploying it to a Docker instance. Now I am working on implementing the same process using orchestration: specifically Mesosphere. Prior to using containers, I deployed to VMWare VMs. In order to build these hosts I utilized the Puppet configuration management tool. Puppet allows a way to create a standard OS configuration. I built a Puppet module that creates a standard configuration for all our machines. We can then import this module into each node's 'manifest' and then define system specific information there. The use of this standard configuration makes it easy to deploy VMs and know they're all consistent. I really enjoy working with Linux systems and still get to script some here and there. There is a Python library called Fabric that is very useful for running commands across many systems. However, I'm glad I'm not doing it that way anymore! If you're interested in this kind of work drop me a line at ben@kulbertis.org.