In this episode, Paul Duvall and Brian Jakovich cover recent DevOps on AWS news and speak with Jim Rohrer from Stelligent about automating the provisioning of AWS Workspace environments using AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and Chef.

Here are the show notes:

DevOps on AWS News

Episode Topics

  1. Can you describe the AWS workspace solution and the use case for designing it?
    1. Custom-designed virtual desktops with “groups” of software pre-installed
    2. Automated pipeline for quickly developing, testing, and deploying new Virtual Desktop images
    3. Ability to scale
  2. What is AWS Workspaces and why was it chosen?
    1. Fully managed cloud-based Desktop as a Service (DaaS)
    2. Feature-rich with many hardware options, including GPU instances
    3. Integrates with Active Directory
    4. Highly scalable
  3. What is Chef and why did you use it in this solution?
    1. Configuration management tool
    2. Store configuration as code
    3. Large community support and ready-made solutions
    4. Fully automatable
  4. How would you extend this solution?
    1. Add in managed Chef Automate solution (OpsWorks for Chef Automate)
    2. Self-service solution for VDI developers
  5. What were the gotchas?
    1. Lack of automation support
    2. Graphics-intensive requirements
    3. BYOL requirements and provisioning issues
  6. What alternatives did you consider to Workspaces and Chef?
    1. EC2
    2. Appstream 2.0
    3. Workspaces Application Manager
    4. Microsoft SCCM/Intune

About DevOps on AWS Radio

On DevOps on AWS Radio, we cover topics around applying DevOps principles and practices such as Continuous Delivery on the Amazon Web Services cloud. This is what we do at Stelligent for our customers. We’ll bring listeners into our roundtables and speak with engineers who’ve recently published on our blog and we’ll also be reaching out to the wider DevOps on AWS community to get their thoughts and insights.
The overall vision of this podcast is to describe how listeners can create a one-click (or “no click”) implementation of their software systems and infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services cloud so that teams can deliver software to users whenever there’s a business need to do so. The podcast will delve into the cultural, process, tooling, and organizational changes that can make this possible including:

  • Automation of
    • Networks (e.g. VPC)
    • Compute (EC2, Containers, Serverless, etc.)
    • Storage (e.g. S3, EBS, etc.)
    • Database and Data (RDS, DynamoDB, etc.)
  • Organizational and Team Structures and Practices
  • Team and Organization Communication and Collaboration
  • Cultural Indicators
  • Version control systems and processes
  • Deployment Pipelines
    • Orchestration of software delivery workflows
    • Execution of these workflows
  • Application/service Architectures – e.g. Microservices
  • Automation of Build and deployment processes
  • Automation of testing and other verification approaches, tools and systems
  • Automation of security practices and approaches
  • Continuous Feedback systems
  • Many other Topics…
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