Back in the Fold

After about 4 years of managing development teams, I'm making the jump back into software engineering to assist my current employer in moving services to AWS. To say that there's some impostor syndrome here is a bit of an understatement. Prior to being a manager, I was a developer (predominantly Java) for 8 years and have continued to dabble, but haven't committed code to production since becoming a manager.

Needless to say, I've got a lot of ground to cover. In order to deploy services to AWS, there are three initial components I'm concentrating on:

• AWS (Up to this point, I can only tell you what EC2 and S3 are from memory. I really have no concept of how they're connected.)
• Docker (Containers for everyone!)
• Chef (I'm still trying to determine if, given an appropriate image for a Docker container, do I need configuration via Chef. So far the literature on the web has been a bit inconclusive).

I spent the 1st week of my new career reboot learning Chef. Not sure why I picked that 1st - probably because Docker necessitates a VM, and I'm on a Chromebook at the moment, and AWS seems a bit too much to bite off for a dilettante.

I really liked running through the exercises at the Chef tutorial site. Because I fat-finger a lot of commands while typing through the examples, I gained some pretty valuable experience about how to run basic commands in Chef and was able to browse the documentation a bit. I made it as far as Learn to manage a basic Ubuntu web application, but then got bogged down a bit while reading through the material on kitchen, Chef's integration testing tool, because I don't have the compute power at the moment to start up a VM (re: see Chromebook reference above).

Still, I'd like to go back and play with ChefSpec and kitchen a bit later to see exactly how one can test infrastructure as code. At this point,prior to trying anything in Docker,it's worth noting that infrastructure that can be saved via a source control repository appears to be very valuable. The literature that I've read seems to indicate that Docker lacks that, but I can't confirm that's the case yet. If it is true, then I can certainly see why Docker and Chef go hand in hand. The former deploys the containers while the latter manages the configuration of those containers via source control.

At this point, however, I've moved on to the basics of AWS by signing up for their free EC2 instance, so it'll be a little while before I solve that mystery. Hopefully, I'll have more to say about the Docker/Chef conundrum and AWS later.