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In computer science (and casual computing), a variable is a location in memory that holds arbitrary information for later use. In other words, it’s a temporary storage container for you to put data into and get data out of. In the Bash shell, that data can be a word (a string, in computer lingo) or a number (an integer).

In this DevOps world, it sometimes appears the Dev half gets all the limelight, with Ops the forgotten half in the relationship. It's almost as if the leading Dev tells the trailing Ops what to do, with almost everything "Ops" being whatever Dev says it should be. Ops, therefore, gets left behind, punted to the back, relegated to the bench.

I'd like to see more OpsDev happening. So let's look at a handful of things Ansible can help you do with your day-to-day Ops life. 

Every file and directory on a Linux system is owned by someone, and the owner has complete control to change or delete the files they own. In addition to having an owning user, a file has an owning group.

You can view the ownership of a file using the ls -l command:

Let's take a trip back to August 1991, when history was in the making. The tech world faced many pivotal moments that continue to impact us today. An intriguing project called the World Wide Web was announced by Tim Berners-Lee and the first website was launched. Super Nintendo was released in the United States and a new chapter of gaming began for kids of all ages. At the University of Helsinki, a student named Linus Torvalds asked his peers for feedback on a new free operating system he had been developing as a hobby. It was then that the Linux kernel was born.

In computing, a kernel is the low-level software that handles communication with hardware and general system coordination. Aside from some initial firmware built into your computer's motherboard, when you start your computer, the kernel is what provides awareness that it has a hard drive and a screen and a keyboard and a network card. It's also the kernel's job to ensure equal time (more or less) is given to each component so that your graphics and audio and filesystem and network all run smoothly, even though they're running concurrently.

The University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) Library houses a collection of millions of rare and unique objects, including materials dating from 3000 BCE, that could be damaged, destroyed, or otherwise threatened if they were displayed.

To make these special collections widely available while keeping them secure, the UCLA Library has been modernizing its digital repository, which was established 15 years ago on now-outdated software.

The word innovation gets bandied about in the tech industry almost as much as revolution, so it can be difficult to differentiate hyperbole from something that’s actually exciting. The Linux kernel has been called innovative, but then again it’s also been called the biggest hack in modern computing, a monolith in a micro world.

Setting aside marketing and modeling, Linux is arguably the most popular kernel of the open source world, and it’s introduced some real game-changers over its nearly 30-year life span.

Recently, Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, announced that Alan Turning would be the new face on the UK£ 50 note.

In Continuous integration testing for the Linux kernel, I wrote about the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project and its mission to change how kernel developers and maintainers work. This article is a deep dive into some of the more technical aspects of the project and how all the pieces fit together.

I first installed Linux in 1993. At that time, you really didn't have many options for installing the operating system. In those early days, many people simply copied a running image from someone else. Then someone had the neat idea to create a "distribution" of Linux that let you customize what software you wanted to install. That was the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) and my first introduction to Linux.

Moving files in Linux can seem relatively straightforward, but there are more options available than most realize. This article teaches beginners how to move files in the GUI and on the command line, but also explains what’s actually happening under the hood, and addresses command line options that many experience users have rarely explored.

I love learning the what, why, and how of new open source projects, especially when they gain popularity in the DevOps space. Classification as a "DevOps technology" tends to mean scalable, collaborative systems that go across a broad range of challenges—from message bus to monitoring and back again. There is always something new to explore, install, spin up, and explore.

Recently, I got a rush request to get a three-node Apache Cassandra cluster with a replication factor of two working for a development job. I had little idea what that meant but needed to figure it out quickly—a typical day in a sysadmin's job.

Here's how to set up a basic three-node Cassandra cluster from scratch with some extra bits for replication and future node expansion.

Open source hardware and 3D printers go together like, well, open source hardware and 3D printers. Not only are 3D printers used to create all sorts of open source hardware—there are also a huge number of 3D printers that have been certified as open source by the Open Source Hardware Association. That fact means that they are freely available to improve and build upon.

Every product or service has a unique way of handling policy and authorization: who-can-do-what and what-can-do-what. In the cloud-native world, authorization and policy are more complex than ever before. As the cloud-native ecosystem evolves, there’s a growing need for DevOps and DevSecOps teams to identify and address security and compliance issues earlier in development and deployment cycles. Businesses need to release software on the order of minutes (instead of months).

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Over the last few months, I participated in two keynote panels where people asked questions about open source licensing:

• Do we need to redefine what open source means in the age of the cloud?
• Are cloud vendors abusing open source?
• Will open source, as we know it, survive?

Last year was the most eventful in my memory for the usually very conservative open source licensing space:

From application deployment to provisioning, Ansible is a powerful open source tool for automating routine IT tasks. It can help an organization's IT run smoothly, with core IT processes networked and maintained. Ansible is an advanced IT orchestration solution, and it can be deployed even over a large, complex network infrastructure.

Old challenges are new again. In this week's Command Line Heroes podcast (Season 3, Episode 5), that thought comes with a twist of programming languages and platforms.

I think everyone can agree that the workplace has changed dramatically in the last decade—or is in the process of changing, depending on where you're currently working. The landscape has evolved. Distributed leadership, project-based work models, and cross-functional solution building are commonplace. In essence, the world is going open.