Solutions architect specializing in automation & orchestration. Interested in configuration management, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code (IaC), and orchestrating disparate pieces of automation.
Martez ReedA growing consideration for cloud spending and the proliferation of AI have caused many organizations to evaluate their use of the public cloud. Many …
Martez ReedJenkins is a popular open source CI server and many that are familiar with it often have a bit of a love/hate relationship. That being said, it is an …
Martez ReedWith everything being defined as code nowadays, there’s a need for a place to store and version that code. The popular selection would be a …
Martez ReedAI is dominating most tech and even non-tech conversations nowadays with no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. This was certainly evident based on …
Martez ReedOne of the technologies that I find the most enjoyable working with are orchestration solutions that are used to stitch together complex processes. …
Martez ReedVMware recently presented at the Tech Field Day Extra event during VMware Explore 2023. The presentation covered VMware’s networking and …
Martez ReedSecurity of a HashiCorp Vault deployment is of paramount importance given the sensitive nature of the information contained within the platform. …
Martez ReedHow do we verify that the Terraform binary we download is the same as the one HashiCorp produced? Ensuring the integrity of software is important to …
Martez ReedSigning software has become critically important given the recent supply chain attacks. How do we verify that the software we’re downloading is …
Martez ReedContainerization and Kubernetes have dominated the IT conversation for the last handful of years. Containers enable rapid development, application …
Martez ReedOne of the major benefits of using the public cloud is the integrated identity and access management (IAM). This simplifies the process of granting …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Vault supports several authentication methods for human and non-human access. Several of the non-human authentication methods are tied to …
Martez ReedNetwork booting operating systems isn’t a new concept and has been around for years. Bare metal deployments are typically where network booting is …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Vault supports a number of authentication methods including methods that utilize what HashiCorp refers to as a “trusted …
Martez ReedThe VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) fling is a really interesting project that enables administrators to take advantage of event driven …
Martez ReedI have made the decision to become the director of technical marketing at Morpheus Data and I start that new position today. Morpheus Data is a …
Martez ReedChaos Engineering is the practice of experimenting or injecting faults into a system to test how the system responds to the failure …
Martez ReedRevoking the root token on a production HashiCorp Vault deployment is one of the recommended best practices for securing an instance of HashiCorp …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Vault generates a default root token during installation and best practice dictates that the token should be revoked once the deployment has …
Martez ReedSecurity of a HashiCorp Vault deployment is of paramount importance given the sensitive nature of the information contained within the platform. …
Martez ReedIn this blog post we’ll look at the HashiCorp Vault plugin for Puppet Bolt that enables authentication credentials for Bolt to be retrieved from …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Terraform is a popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that is used for provisioning virtual machines or cloud instances along with other …
Martez ReedTreating workloads as “cattle” or immutable is a popular management paradigm for stateless workloads and is especially prevalent for such …
Martez ReedTemplate management is a critical facet of infrastructure management and traditionally one of the more challenging operations there is. The advent of …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Terraform 0.12.2 added official support for a Puppet provisioner. One caveat is that the provisioner is only available in 0.12.x of …
Martez ReedI’m now in my second week at Puppet which is best known for its configuration management software that shares the same name as the company. …
Martez ReedI gave a talk for HashiCorp’s HashiDays event earlier this year that centered around operational intelligence for HashiCorp Vault. The focus was …
Martez ReedHashiCorp Vault is quickly becoming the defacto secrets management platform used in environments that rely on DevOps concepts for application …
Martez ReedNetApp was one of the “legacy” companies that presented a number of compelling solutions at Cloud Field Day #3. The challenge for many …
Martez ReedEarlier this month I had the privilege of being a delegate for Cloud Field Day 3 (http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd3/) which is a tech event put …
Martez ReedVault (https://www.vaultproject.io/) is a secrets management tool created by HashiCorp that is extremely popular. Given the sensitive nature of the …
Martez ReedA very popular Terraform state management configuration is to utilize AWS S3 for state management and AWS DynamoDB for state locking. The problem is …
Martez ReedWhat is immutable infrastructure? Immutable infrastructure is the concept of utilizing an infrastructure component in an ephemeral manner. This means …
Martez ReedIn a previous post we walked through configuring a PostgreSQL database server as the external database for our vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) cluster. In …
Martez ReedIn this post we’re going to build out a two node vRealize Orchestrator cluster with a PostgreSQL database. VMware is deprecating support for …
Martez ReedIn this post we’re going to walk through how to dynamically populate a vRA request field using values retrieved from a REST API using vRO. A …
Martez ReedIn this post we’ll walk through how we can utilize vRealize Orchestrator and Splunk to determine how compliant our vRA appliance is with the …
Martez ReedA recent blog post by Rob Nelson about using vRO to provision VMs with vSphere tags …
Martez ReedChatOps is a pretty cool and still emerging technology that allows users to initiate actions on external systems from within a messaging platform such …
Martez ReedWhat is Policy Based Autosigning A critical aspect of any Puppet deployment is determining how we want to allow nodes to get their certificate signed …
Martez ReedBeing notified of when something happens in your environment has always been important and has evolved over time from basic emails to IM messages via …
Martez ReedThis post covers the section listed below on the Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE) exam. Section #3: Building Continuous Delivery (CD) Pipelines …
Martez ReedDocker (https://www.docker.com/) is arguably the most popular container platform and this post covers a number of useful Docker commands from basic …
Martez ReedThis post covers the section listed below on the Certified Jenkins Engineer (CJE) exam. Section #1: Key CI/CD/Jenkins Concepts Fingerprints What are …
Martez ReedRecently a co-worker of mine (Thanks Ken Erwin) introduced me to Jenkins Job Builder (http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/) which is a …
Martez ReedThis post covers integrating Jenkins CI server with Microsoft Active Directory to provide centralized authentication. Step #1 - Install he Active …
Martez ReedPuppet supports various hiera backends to pull in external data from various sources. This post will cover integrating open source puppet with a …