Grounded in the Enterprise

I've been getting started on a small prototype in the office, and as part of that work I was setting up a Vagrant box so I can install a few packages and not worry about having to clean my machine up afterward. As part of the process, I ran into a fun little error that I thought I'd share in case anyone else runs into it.

Since the deployment environment is RedHat, I wanted to base the box on CentOS. I've been creating my own base boxes rather than working with random OS installs from the Net, so I spent a couple of days getting a base box together and up and running. Most of the work came from tying to strip down the CentOS install to be nice and small while still including features like SELinux that I'm expecting to deal with in production.

After a couple of days of trying to trim down the CentOS install (special thanks to Owl River Company's post on tiny CentOS and the associated scripts), I had a box that was working and I could get started up with Vagrant. Unfortunately, I couldn't provision it.

Yesterday at a meeting about our division's architecture standards, we were discussing the need for vendor and open source application to adhere to both corporate and divisional architecture standards. After a bit of grumbling (mostly from me) about the difficulties and cultural impacts of trying to enforce our standards when vendors sell directly to our business partners, the topic of modifying open source tools to user our internal security framework came up.

I have taken for granted that people understand the freedoms that open source provides, and the responsibilities that come with the rights granted by open source licenses. After six years in startups that made extensive use of open source (including two at an open source company), it still surprises me when people misunderstand the obligations they are under when using and modifying open source within a large organization.

One of my colleagues raised a concern about obligations to release any modifications to open source software and what that would mean in the context of our security standards.

Amazon’s initial attempt at a Platform as a Service (PaaS) play is limited to Java, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get Drupal up and running.  Most dynamic languages have been reimplemented on top of the JVM, and PHP is no exception.  A quick Google search turned up a blog post by Cameron Stokes about running PHP apps on Elastic Beanstalk using Quercus.

I first encountered Quercus while working at Acquia.  When I started there we talked about it in a lot of theoretical discussions about how what it might mean for Drupal, but it didn’t amount to much more than talk.  A short time later, I had a client with a lot of legacy Java code that they wanted to integrate with a new Drupal site.  I spent a coupe of days on site with them and one afternoon we were able to get the Acquia Drupal distribution running on Quercus.  We even loaded a proof-of-concept module that was written in Java.  I don’t have the code to that module any longer, but it was pretty simple and just printed the current date using java.util.Date.

Since Quercus enables you to run PHP apps in an Elastic Beanstalk instance, and Drupal runs on Quercus, it seems pretty straightforward to run Drupal using the same model that Stokes posts in his blog.

Sunday afternoon I was thinking through dinner options and wanted something that fit with Super Bowl Sunday. I hadn’t gone for groceries yet and knew that between finishing up the shopping and the start of the game I wasn’t going to have much time to put something together. I also needed something the kids would eat without too much fuss.

I needed to work with what was in the house, and we have a new slow cooker that I wanted to try out (the Hamilton Beach 33967 if you’re interested). Chili seemed like my best bet for something appropriate to the game, slow cooker ready, and with pretty basic ingredients.

In a discussion today with our office book club—where we are reading SDLC 3.0 by Mark Kennaley (@sdlc3)—the topic of value for a software system. Specifically, the discussion revolved around measuring the business value of our IT projects. In general, we do a pretty good job of building a business case, and we've gotten very good at measuring both our estimated and actual costs. With these measures, we can get a relatively good idea of whether a project is "worth doing" and whether we managed to our cost projections.

Sounds like we have a good grasp of the business value we're delivering.

Has it really been two years?

I have to admit I didn't think it had been that long, but it makes sense. I was a pretty sporadic blogger as it was, then I was off to DC where I couldn't blog about the major government web site I was working on. Add to that my departure from Acquia and step behind the curtain of the enterprise, and it doesn't seem like as much of a surprise after all.

I'd been starting to yearn for an outlet with a bit more expressiveness than Twitter when Robert Douglass's "homework" tweet appeared

@robertDouglass: Your Drupal homework: write a thoughtful blog post on why this would or wouldn't be good for Drupal: http://is.gd/198sUM #drupalappstore

After engaging in the discussion for a bit, I realized I had a bit more to say, and a bit of homework to do if I wanted a place to day it: I had to build out a new server instance, restore my blog, and rebranded it to reflect that I'd left the world of software professional services (at least for now). Well, that much is done. At Your (Professional) Service is now Grounded in the Enterprise. I'm also looking into way to incorporate content from my first blog.

All this setup has been a fun way to procrastinate, but now I've got to get back to the homework at hand, and let you know what I think of the #drupalappstore idea.

WSJ travel columnist Scott McCartney offers his plea for how President-elect Obama can simplify the lives of business travelers by splitting the FAA into two different arms—one for regulation and the other for air traffic control and management.

He recommends that President Obama work to create the latter entity as a quasi-government organization or a non-profit corporation like those in Australia, Canada, and the UK. This is an intriguing idea to me, though it concerns me a bit when I think about the history and success of the other such transportation entity.