Steffen Gebert

During and after the presentation about Jenkins pipelines that I gave yesterday at the DevOps Meetup Stuttgart, we had a couple of very interesting discussions. One of them was a way to make a Jenkins pipeline job parametrized. Use cases for this that were discussed included different target environments, into which the pipeline should deploy to. While it is not very obvious, there is one particular step that allows to configure a pipeline job’s properties, including triggers, how to rotate logs, and said input parameters: The properties step contained in the multibranch plugin. Please don’t expect too much from the...…

As a long-time visitor of the DevOps Frankfurt meetup, I always had the desire for establishing the same kind of event here in my beautiful town of Würzburg. Together with Andreas Rudat (mayflower) and Sebastian Kremer (Eikona), we finally made it happen with our first event of DevOps Würzburg Mainfranken. …

Right now, I am sitting in the train on my way back from the DevOps Camp Compact in Nürnberg. It was a very exhausting day with two talks that I gave and a lot of information and energy that I got from it. I want to thank the organizers Tobias and Stefan, the location sponsor (my TYPO3 friends Netlogix), and the roughly 100 participants that made this such a great day. Further, I’m happy that I was finally able to join the 6th edition after I wasn’t able to attend the previous four events. …

I am a big fan of the new Jenkins Pipeline suite and enjoy defining my pipelines as code. Now, I noticed that there is even a way to make IntelliJ IDEA aware ofthe pipeline DSL syntax, which supports the developer with autocompletion and documentation. For looking up the DSL syntax, I am a frequent visitor of the Pipeline Steps Reference on jenkins.io. As I am only seldom visiting the Jenkins web interface to use the Pipeline Syntax Snippet Generator, I was a bit puzzled when I stumbled over a mysterious IntelliJ IDEA GDSL link (available for logged-in users). After reading...…

Virt-Manager is a graphical user interface for libvirt, a popular toolset for managing virtual machines provided by KVM. Unfortunately, it does not work well on MacOS. The MacOS port did not work for me, as I was not able to connect to the socket on the remote host even after changing adding the socket=/var/run/libvirt/libvirt-sock parameter. The same holds for its command-line pendant virsh. So the idea to let it natively run on Linux inside a Vagrant VM came up. Running Virt-Manager in Vagrant On that path, I had to overcome the following two challenges: to run a window manager inside...…

OpenStack Heat is the orchestration project of OpenStack, which allows to describe and provision OpenStack resources based on Heat templates, similar to Amazon CloudFormation. For a research project, I recently had the requirement to assign a floating IP address to every instance of a Heat autoscaling group (ASG). Given the fact that such setup is contradictory to the common practice having a load balancer in front of an ASG, this costed me some time to figure out. …