Must start somewhere - Pied Piper Program intro

By Al
Welcome to my blog! Thanks for dropping by considering I am still trying to shape up this project

The idea at this stage is to share some of the content I have developed for a project we are running at work. This project is called Pied Piper and was kicked off in June 2017, so slightly over 2 months right now, although due to high levels of activity if feels we have been at it for longer than that.

I work for DellEMC as a presales systems engineer (EMC before the merge) focusing mainly on block storage. The world around us is changing and we need to change with it. Organisations of all shapes and sizes in every industry need to embrace the digital transformation to add value to their business and stay competitive. Presales engineers need to transform themselves by learning new skills to be able to guide customers through the digital transformation journey.

Amongst other things the Pied Piper program aims at enabling the participants in the three pillars of the Digital Transformation:
  • Cloud Native Applications (as well as how teams organise themselves to deliver them including Agile and DevOps)
  • Internet of Things
  • Big Data analytics
The enablement puts strong emphasis on getting hands-on experience in all three pillars using Python as the common language for all of them. The blog will discuss some lessons I learned during the preparation and delivery of the program with special attention to areas where I struggled to find accurate information. In the different posts I will point you to different Github repositories that contain the code and tutorials we are using for our enablement.

For now take a look at this personal project I did last year. Welcome to Pied Piper!



This is part 1 of a 5 post series about the 2017 Pied Piper program:
1 - Program intro - Must start somewhere
2 - Personal projects
3 - Hackathon
4 - Agile sprints
5 - Tech Summit

You might want to explore the other articles as well

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sending PowerStore alerts via SNMP

By Al
Image
In this previous article we discussed how to leverage PowerStore's powerful API to collect audit logs and send them to a Syslog server . We used Logstash to do that because of its extensive list of plugins Sometimes I come across organizations that still have a requirement to send storage array Alerts to SNMP. As in the Syslog case, ultimately most modern monitoring tools today support collecting information via REST API because that's the way the application world is going, i.e. the cloud native way ... it would be fun to see Prometheus monitoring Kubernetes via SNMP :) However there is still some requirement out there for SNMP traps, so we will explore how to do it. For simplicity we will use the same toolset that we used in the previous article. I encourage you to revisit quickly the article as we did an extensive introduction to Logstash, with practical examples as well as a description of the logs available in PowerStore. I won't cover those aspects in this article I
Read more

Electronic Nose - eNose

By Al
Image
In the previous article I provided details on VeeFarm which was one of the best projects we saw in ANZ Pied Piper 2019 edition and one of the best projects in the history of the program. The program inspired me and others to work together to showcase a great idea and the Pied Piper program itself during our presales conference. An idea I suggested to enhance VeeFarm was an electronic nose that could be used to detect the optimal ripening of the produce to advise the owner that it is the right time to pick it up the produce. This is an idea I had in the backburner for a while but never found the time to work on. Vee gave me the perfect excuse. The electronic nose, or eNose for short, is a custom PCB that hosts a range of gas sensors. For the proof of concept, I used the cheap MQ sensors. These are designed mostly for hobbyists and makers and they barely cost $1 per sensor. As one could expect, tweaking and calibrating these sensors it is even harder than the most expensive counter
Read more

Use Vagrant to deploy to AWS

By Al
Image
In the Pied Piper program we run through a Vagrant tutorial as we found it a great tool to help set up other labs. We are not going to cover Vagrant in detail in this blog as there are plenty of good examples out there. If you are interested in the exercises we did you can visit the repository: https://github.com/cermegno/vagrant-lesson However, something I felt is not sufficiently document and would make a good candidate for a post is how to use Vagrant to deploy to AWS and particularly from Windows. I found a couple of posts that provided good detail but none of them prevented me from running into Windows specific issues. If you are running it from Linux, this article will still help you as I will point out the differences anyway. Install prerequisites Firstly, as the Vagrant documentation states, "providers" other than VirtualBox require a plug in. This is how you install the AWS provider: vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws Deploying to AWS EC2 generally mea
Read more