What Is Knowledge of Branching Strategies?

Problem scenario
You are preparing for an interview for a job (build/release engineer or DevOps engineer) where a requirement is “knowledge of branching strategies.” There are different patterns, models, paradigms, workflows and even philosophies associated with branches in repositories. What is knowledge of branching strategies in the context of code versioning systems and the CI/CD pipeline?

Solution

***Updated in January of 2022.***

Background
Open source projects may have different branching strategies from enterprises developing in-house proprietary software.

How Do You Troubleshoot the Ansible Playbook Error Associated with “[Errno 2] No such file or directory”?

Problem scenario
When running an Ansible playbook using the java_cert module you receive an message “[Errno 2] No such file or directory”. How do you fix this?
(If you were using a file linking step in the playbook and not the java_cert module, see this posting.)

Solution
Use the “executable” attribute of the java_certs module (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/java_cert_module.html) to specify the full path of the keytool file.

What Are The Advantages of a Service over an Ingress in Kubernetes?

Problem scenario
You have read that Ingresses have benefits compared to Services. You know the two are different for routing external traffic to reach a Kubernetes pod. When would you want to use a Service instead of an Ingress?

Possible Answers

  1. When you want to direct traffic to Pods based on a selector and not an IP address. Ingresses use IP addresses*,

How Do You Troubleshoot Viewing a PDF when You Encounter The Error “Please wait… If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents”?

Problem scenario
Use PDF Architect or Adobe Acrobat you open a PDF but you see “Please wait… If this message is not eventually replaced by the proper contents of the document, your PDF viewer may not be able to display this type of document.” You know the PDF is good. You may or may not be prompted to enter a password to view the PDF. You don’t think that the PDF viewer should be prompting you for a password.

What is a Multi-branch Jenkins Job?

Question
With a newer version of Jenkins, you want to know what a multi-branch job is. What is a multi-branch Jenkins job?

Answer
In Jenkins, a project is a job; the term job has been deprecated however (according to the Jenkins’ website). To see the difference between a Jenkins pipeline and a Jenkins project, see this posting: What Is the Difference between a Jenkins Project and a Jenkins Pipeline?

How Can Nginx Be an HTTP Load Balancer for Apache Web Servers?

Problem scenario
You have an Nginx server that you want to be a traffic distributor to Apache web servers.   What has to be done to configure Nginx’s HTTP load balancing function to relay inbound connection requests to Apache web servers?

Solution
Nothing special has to be done for the web servers.  Nginx can be a reverse proxy to either Nginx web servers or Apache web servers. 

How Do You Troubleshoot the AWS CLI Error Regarding IllegalLocationConstraintException?

Problem scenario
You run a command like this:

aws s3api create-bucket –bucket coolnameforbucket

But you get this error:
“An error occurred (IllegalLocationConstraintException) when calling the CreateBucket operation: The unspecified location constraint is incompatible for the region specific endpoint this request was sent to.”

How do you create a bucket with the aws s3api command?

Possible Solution #1
Run a command such as this,