The Most Popular Recent “How To” Blogs On StackStorm.com

July 21, 2015
by Evan Powell

Over the last 5 months, since March, we have published a number of content rich blogs.  All told I counted some 25 that show users how to do something or provide an overview of a technical subject.

Here are the top 10 blogs in order of visitors:

  1. The Return of Workflows
  2. Ansible Chatops – Get Started
  3. Implementing ChatOps with StackStorm
  4. OpenStack v. Docker – its the DevOps stupid
  5. New in StackStorm – Ansible integration
  6. StackStorm v. AWS Lambda
  7. Using StackStorm to Auto-Invite users to a Slack organization
  8. StackStorm and ChatOps for Dummies
  9. How StackStorm Partnered with Rackspace and New Relic to Deliver Autoscaling
  10. Enhanced Chatops from StackStorm

A few observations:

Workflows are hot in operations / DevOps and this blog post is arguably the best survey of the field available these days.  So word of mouth somehow has resulted in this timely blog consistently, week on week, being well read.

Ansible and ChatOps are each powerful draws to our blog.  That suggests to me that there is some real overlap on the part of StackStorm users and Ansible and ChatOps enthusiasts.

And oldie but a goody is the AWS Lambda blog which despite being published last year is still attracting knowledgeable users to the StackStorm blog.

Finally, to me the list – and the other blogs that have also been well read – suggest that the team here has the ability to create useful content!

It is worth noting that we are just starting to get solid content from partners.  The StackStorm and ChatOps for Dummies came from the ChatOps for Dummies book that for which our own James Fryman wrote the forward.

A couple of blogs that didn’t quite make the top 10 list from a great monitoring service, DripStat, and their CTO Prashant Deva opened some eyes to simple ways to connect StackStorm to application monitoring whether for escalation and integration into PagerDuty or Twilio or to directly auto remediate issues like OutOfMemory exceptions and highGC pause times.

And there is a blog in flight right now on SaltStack and StackStorm from a great DevOps engineer and partner Jurnell Cockhren, CTO and Founder of Sonicware.   I’ll link to it here when it emerges.

If you have ideas on useful blogs, please let us know below or on twitter @stack_storm and let us know if you might want to write one yourself.  Also – you might be interested in getting insights and advice from other StackStorm users from the Slack-StackStorm community.