The Future is Bright…

When news breaks of a large tech company sale, in the midst of a global pandemic, people will sit up and take note. It’s fair to say this one is huge news, and the future is indeed very bright.

https://www.epicor.com/en-uk/press-room/news-releases/clayton-dubilier-rice-to-acquire-epicor-software-corporation-from-kkr/

On a personal note this will be the 4th acquisition/takeover/purchase of a company I work for in 5 years, see previous posts for notes on those!

Q1 FY20 Part 1

Back on October 1st 2019 I decided to take a leap of faith and join the dark side, this has resulted in me becoming the UK’s first dedicated QA for our Custom development teams. Effectively we develop, using our own SDK and lots of other clever tools, the things that customers would love to have, but which do not come out of the box. Having visited many customer sites in the last couple of years, I have nothing but appreciation for the quality and depth of work this team produces, and it’s absolutely my pleasure to be a part of it going forwards.

My first task, set on Day 1 was to own the migration of systems from one domain to the other. Those who have followed any of my previous posts in the last 4 years will be aware I went from small local company to global ERP vendor overnight (June 1st 2016) by way of an acquisition. Well imagine moving that small dev team’s environments into a very well protected and governed American corporate ecosystem, it was effectively sat on for 3 years, and corporate policies dictated we migrated and shutdown the old!

Deciding where to start was easy… Spend a week or so working on testing out a couple of theories, having done domain migrations previously, and work with internal IT teams to put in the relevant requests and procedures to ensure those theories are robust, scalable and secure. Three weeks in and hours had been wasted scripting out a copy and paste scenario, basically a load of PowerShell scripts to do Find/Replace style blitz across 1000s of files, 10 different ERP versions, 200+ development environments (with Databases). Only the one slight snag, even after reworking permissions and roping IT into a 3TB file copy across 2 unconnected domains…. Internally developed environmnent management tooling, which with all its bells and whistles, was not supportive of the new domain, and had hardcoded ties to the older domain’s file server, oops.

Rethink time… Plan B – the best of the lot. Copying databases is one of those things I literally wrote the manual on for Epicor ERP, so that’s easy; building Windows servers has been the last 10 years of my life, so again, sorted; that leaves my understanding of the tooling that sits in the middle, well, fortunately, my new desk backs on to the lovely chap who wrote that tool, even though he now runs our R&D division, so with a few conversations and about 8 lines of code he rebuilt it for me to work on the new environments, allowing me to fully document it as it got deployed and hey presto, a working blank set of servers ready for migrated data was born within a week; including the ability to build any version of ERP 10, using blank, demo or customer data – depending on whether it’s development or QA work, and the ability to use all the latest features and more importantly the latest development tools, by way of Chocolatey!

The next few weeks consisted of identifying what needed to be moved, and what we could spin up later on demand, the resulting list was around 120 required environments, mostly because of productised “Extended Solutions” which need to be built for each version of ERP 10 we support. But also ongoing customer projects, version uplifts, test environments for developers to test their own theories and boost their skills etc. This was a very slow and involved process, per Environment/DB it was not too bad, but in Part 2 (when I write it) I’ll go through how my domain migration project became an environment and process improvement project, featuring Git, Jenkins, CI/CD and

The good news is my Domain Migration which we scheduled to be fully complete, i.e old domain shut down for 24th December 2019, was in fact completed on 6th December 2019, so despite the slightly wasted 3 weeks of testing, scripting, and familiarisation, with all parties on board we (sadly) shutdown the Dot Net IT domain at 17:30 that evening!

SQL/Server Health Checks

Recently I’ve been asked to develop a set of scripts, plans and reports packaged up as a general server health check, but also with a specific focus on ERP servers, by which we’re interpreting as the Application and Database servers (Microsoft SQL in this case).

The thing is, if you Google “Server Healthcheck” or “SQL Performance Analysis” and everything in between, you will find a large array of sites out there specifically designed for these purposes. Therefore, I am now interperting my task as “analyse the tools already available and package up a selection of the best to add value to our customers”.

As thie self proclaimed king of scripting I have already started my work on a selection of scripts to analyse and build reports on various areas of systems, from the OS level all the way through to the DB contents where required. As always I welcome feedback on things I could be using on this project.

To begin with I’m focussing on the SQL analysis, T-SQL is still fairly new to me, so I’d rather reuse what’s already out there for example Brent Ozar’s SQL Health Check (https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2017/10/free-sql-server-health-check/). I will use the intial out of the box analysis, running it across a variety of systems to see where the standard baselines need adjusting (paramaterization and parallelism anyone?) and then build my own rules and descriptions to better benefit our specific needs. Sounds fun right?

Watch this space as I develop the scripts and reports, the eventual end game would be to run 1 executable/script with a set of predefined constants (server names, user credentials etc) and have a close to complete report out the end of it. If you do know of any sites or tools out there that can help me complete this then please do get in touch @jaward916

 

This and That

Over the last few month I’ve tried to expand my horizons a little bit. Since 2009 I have worked in a few different technical roles, from helping to run data centres, and setup environments for ISV engagements at IBM, to running all systems for a rapidly growing Oracle partner, whilst on the side managing 100 websites including e-commerce sites. That led into my quick stint doing tech support in the Automotive sector before moving into customer facing roles in Jan 2016. Since then I’ve always been running on a few different threads, these have been, loosely:

  • Installs/Config for ERP systems including initial system design
  • Technical training of customers in those ERP systems
  • Technical management of escalated issues (across the world)
  • Cross-team liason for high profile or highly escalated customers
  • Coordination of international team of installations consultants
  • Development of internal tooling for installs/ technical consulting
  • Management of environments for wider team

From my recent posts it’s obvious which areas on that list have received the most focus over the last few months, notably the last two, which is where all the DevOps/Code posts are centred around. The reason so much focus has been on this, and I’ll add at this point a lot of it out of work hours, is because it’s something I enjoy, something I’ve been on the edge of before, and an area of technology that I personally believe we should all be at least aware of, and able to understand the basic principles of.

DevOps was a term coined many years before it became mainstream. Mike Loukides wrote a 20 page book called “What is DevOps” back in June 2012, which is published by the world renowned O’Reilly Media. (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920026822.do) That’s some time before I came across the term, although it seems I was already aware of some of the practices that now come under that umbrella. Back then I was managing E-Commerce sites, writing PHP websites against MySQL databases and moving a very static, cumbersome “tin-factory” infrastructure over to more dynamic, sustainable growth-capable platform. With a little more time and knowledge at that time I would’ve potentially moved in different directions. I am now starting to close that circle a little from the other side.

For me, career development is crucial, I am more than happy to stay with one company, or in one role, but I will always push to make more of myself, learn new things, get involved with everything possible and break down any and all barriers. I don’t do this to benefit myself, I see it as an opprtunity for me to be a benefit to those around me, both customers and colleagues.

Outside of DevOps activities over the recent months I’ve also been working on my presentation skills, with opportunities to present to colleagues and customers about various technical topics, including System Adminstration, upcoming product changes, best practices etc. This is in part due to being given more free reign with my current role, while we work out what my future roles may or may not include, and that’s if any change at all! In the background, the day to role keeps me busy, planning installs, speaking to new customers about how to deploy, speaking to existing customers about upgrades or enhancements to their systems, all the fun stuff that keeps money in the bank and roofs over heads!

The next few months may get a little busy, well hopefully they will, and all the good stuff will be posted when the chances arise.

#Code

First things first, #notadeveloper. I cannot stress this enough, I am not trained to write code, neither am I employed to do so. However, I do enjoy writing code, I find a lot of satisfaction in hitting the run button and watching something I wrote come alive. Previously I have posted many tweets and blog entries of my coding adventures over the years. My crowing achievement to date is probably the PHP/MySQL based “Asset Management” system, a glorified inventory list ability to Assign to a person, and add a list of repairs or reinstalls against the items. It automated a part of my job I disliked, and quite frankly that is exactly what I love about code. Almost all of the scripts I have written over the years have had the primary purpose of automating repetitive tasks any sysadmin can do with their eyes closed, mostly this has been silent install scripts and updaters.

Fast forward on a little from my sysadmin days, and to the brave new world (for me) of ERP. My primary day job is planning, coordinating and performing installations of ERP software into all sorts of manufacturing and distribution companies. Some are small, many are large, so the nature of, the deployments can vary slightly. That’s generally the bit I’m good at; sizing and planning the system to meet size and expectations of the end users. What we found over the last 2 years is that whilst deployments vary slightly, there is a bulk of work that is virtually the same every time round, certainly in process if not inputs, however we found that amongst the team; time, accuracy and experience could vary, significantly in some cases. Therefore a colleague of mine, with vastly more years experience in product and process went to the efforts to write an automation tool, a set of PowerShell scripts and XML files used to automate the bulk of the installation process. Roll on a few months and instantly accuracy and time were improving, which in turn was improving everyone’s experience. Gone were the days of random (user) errors and here are the days of productivity and valid errors which have much, much more context!

 

So let’s get techy on this and roll on a little further in time; following a few changes, ownership of the tool is now with me. And with a potentially different future ahead, it may only be a short term thing (it may also be long term!), so with this in mind, I sought help of people who know what they are doing, exceptionally smart developers in this case. After a couple of remote session the following has occurred:

Task 1 – Get the code secured. We can’t have something this crucial to our process hiding on a random VM with no backups.

Solution –  Git based code repository, in this case Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

 

Task 2 – Get the additional features into the code, but fully tested before deploying.

Solution – Branch off. Currently running with 2 branches, one for immediate fixes/quick additions, and one for next revision which will do far more than just  installing (Shhhh it’s Top Secret)

 

Task 3 – Get the code tidied up, to some form of best practices etc.

Solution – VSTS Build running PowerShell scripts with Pester and PowerShell Script Analyzer to validate all PowerShell scripts against a set of generally accepted best practice rules.

 

Task 4 – Packaging. No one wants to manually build a zip file, upload it to a SharePoint site and email out a notification for every small fix that goes in

Solution  – NuGet and Chocolatey via a VSTS Package Feed.

 

Since this became my problem, three versions of the tooling have been released, packaging only got tested this week so isn’t the primary deployment method yet, but now we have it as a capability there will be many more versions, but that just wont matter as they will always have whatever is the latest in the master branch!

 

Ok so that all explains my random tweets from evenings and weekends over the last month or so, fortunately I’ve had some incredible guidance from some very skilled and friendly development colleagues. Without those guys, I wouldn’t be anywhere with all this other than a whole load of files and folders on one machine with no backups!

 

I’d also like to give back to the community a little, so I plan to have some scripts that I write for more generic tasks uploaded to a public facing Git at https://github.com/jaward916 further to that I have below added a list of all the bookmarks I’ve been building up, especially the ones around Tasks 3 and 4, which has been the key functionality I’ve explored and implemented in the last week.

 

I stress once again, I am not a developer, please do not laugh at my code, or my very basic explanations of the tools and processes, I am learning for fun, but developing to make everyone’s lives a little easier in my world!

 

Bookmarks for VSTS

Few things to cover…

Firstly, thank you for stopping by, taking time to view my blog, read my posts and hopefully take something away from them.

If you do happen to like the posts on here, then please do say so; retweet, Facebook share, LinkedIn, whatever, it would be great to get more of my content out there, and more of you on here!

Also If you have any post requests or tech questions, please send those over too, Twitter is possibly the best for that @jaward916

Secondly, apologies for the lack of posts during February. Over the Christmas break I had some good ideas which I made lots of notes for then came up with the 4 posts during Januray, however the ideas have dried up (already) and family related things have meant less free weekends. The weekday’s are taken up with the job, typically Sundays are when I get “me” time to do some techy stuff for my benfit rather than for customers!

Finally…

Whilst I don’t have a nice full topic to write up for this week (I promise there are some ideas bouncing around in my head) what I do have is a snippet of 2018 so far in my world of tech/code/software etc.

During January I spent many hours getting to grips with a new major release of the software I work with, as I’m a little bit of a nerd, a lot of those hours were spent in my own time, drilling down into things, working scenarios out, deplyoment strategies etc. What I ended up with by last week was a full test scenario, remeniscient of a real world deployment. Effectivley emulating what a customer would have. The really cool thing is this allows me to very quickly test out scenarios, when a customer reports something “not working” I can run it through my servers and give them an answer same day along the lines of (usually) “try this, I think you’ve done X in the wrong place”. This is in no way a bypass to my wonderful colleagues in Support, but more of a way to assist the customer with getting their deployment up and running. I don’t generally delve into the applications, I’m not that kind of consultant. What I do is design deployments and implement them, I get the back end of a system up and running. The latest version included quite a few new technical enhancements, so getting experienced with them is an essential part of me being able to do my job!

February hasseen a few more interesting engagements for me, site visits all over the place (on top of delivering 2 training courses during January), with some more lined up, possibly even abroad.

What I am being asked to do now is anlyse, review, and in some cases redesign or reimplement deployments. Not because what they have was done wrong to start with, far from it, but more to help them become future-proof, employ best practices and become more agile as the world around us is changing, and the software adjusts to match. There’s no wheel reinvention, just a set of new tyres here and a bit of air there.

I write on here a lot about SQL Server as it is the underlying DB server platform for all systems I support. Another area of SQL that has always interested me is SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services), basically a very smart, sometimes fiddly report generation toolset. What I have been able to do over the last few weeks is take some reports, rip them apart, analyse a few minor but irritating issues and develop solutoins to those problems. The strange thing is that I’ve not been trained in SSRS, or had the change do do anything with it prior ot this. I just saw an issue, delved straight into the SSRS builder and worked it out, for myself. I forgot I had those abillites and it’s been refreshing to remember how good I used to be solving new problems.

I’m thinking some SSRS tips in a post may be some decent content in the future, think I’ll build the scrapbook up on those!

 

That’s it for an update, I’ve also updated the About page on this site to reflect the last 2 years!