Daniel Sands has been a DevOps Engineer at Ancestry.com since December of 2011. Prior to joining Ancestry.com, he served as the Vice President of Information Technologies at the Enlightened Wealth Institute based in Provo Utah from January 2008 to December of 2011. Mr. Sands holds an M.B.A. with an Information Technology specialization from Western Governers University. His favorite quote is “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” - Walt Disney
From an engineering and development standpoint, one of the most important aspects of cloud infrastructure is the concept of unlimited resources. The idea of being able to get a new server to experiment with, or being able to spin up more servers on the fly to handle a traffic spike is a foundational benefit of Read More
I recently came across this article on the INTUIT QuickBase blog and was intrigued by the premise. It asserts that inside any team or organization, you will have a bell curve of talent and intelligence – which most would agree to. It’s not a bad thing, it just happens. Regardless of how well staffed you Read More
We’ve been working with Chef (formerly OpsCode) for a couple years now. I can safely say that I’ve spent more time crawling through forums and reviewing code documentation than I care to admit. In all that time, I’ve never seen anyone clearly document how to use Chef dynamically. I hope that I can share some Read More
In the IT industry today, Virtualization is one of the hottest buzzwords around. It seems like everyone uses, supports, provides tools for, and/or sells something that has “virtual” in its name. Virtualization is a fun concept that has a lot of interesting ideas floating around it, but at its core, Virtualization is nothing more than Read More
For the last year and a half, we’ve been breaking in a new concept at Ancestry.com called a DevOps engineer. There is a ton of material on the internet about what DevOps means to various groups, and how they’ve implemented it. A lot of it revolves around SCRUM, Agile processes, and other approaches to increase Read More