ICYMI, BitOps v2.0 is here and better than ever! We’ve introduced new features and improvements like support for plugins and a more powerful engine.

Introducing BitOps v2.0! After months of heavy development, BitOps v2.0 is available for download. The new version is a major iteration of the powerful Operations Repository pattern to organize Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

This meetup has already happened, but you can still watch the videos! Check out four presentations on DevOps-focused topics. 

HeyEmoji is a fantastic reward system teams can use to recognize each other's accomplishments, dedication, and hard work. Once you get it set up, you can mention a colleague's Slack username in any channel along with a pre-configured reward emoji - you can even include a short description of what they did that was so awesome it deserved a shoutout.

The best part? When you send an emoji to a colleague, they get emoji points, which can be tracked on a leaderboard. Competing to see who can be most helpful, considerate, or skilled at their jobs is a pretty fun way to make the day fly by. 

Want to get HeyEmoji on your own work Slack channel? This tutorial walks you through how to deploy the HeyEmoji Slack app to AWS using Terraform+Ansible so your team can enjoy Slack-generated kudos. 

In a recent series of blog posts, I drew up how to go from a basic StackStorm installation and pack deployed using Ansible, to moving that entire custom deployment to a one-touch cloud deployment using BitOps while only modifying a handful of files in the process.

We only barely scratched the surface of our implementation, and we can always go further. One aspect I tried to be mindful of throughout the guides was the various ways of managing of secrets. In this guide we will detail how we can utilize an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) key as well as AWS Systems Manager (SSM) and Parameter Store to take that a step further.

In practical terms: we'll create a BitOps before hook script we use to retrieve all of the secret variables we need from AWS, and demonstrate how we can load those into the BitOps container environment for usage within our existing Ansible StackStorm playbook.

Last time, we had refactored our basic one-line install of StackStorm and our custom pack into an Ansible playbook. The Ansible playbook works well enough on its own but still requires us to already have a server setup for Ansible to execute the playbook on. What if we didn't need that pre-existing server and were able to on-the-fly provision one for our playbook? This arena is where Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) initiatives really shine and where I would now like to introduce BitOps.

BitOps works well with different deployment tools and today’s focus is on Terraform. By the end of this you will have used BitOps to create a prod and test AWS VPC.

BitOps is an open source Docker image created by Bitovi that bundles popular deployment tools with the understanding of what to do with an operations repository. This coupling makes it easier than ever to set up the automated deployment of cloud infrastructure. However, BitOps requires an operations repository to work its magic.

This is part 2 of a BitOps tutorial series:

• Part 1: Introducing BitOps