Notes on infrastructure, software & the work behind it.
Ideas, experience, and notes from the work.
In 2024 I made a career decision I had previously avoided: I was going to move into people management. I had toyed with this idea for most of my career, but felt I needed a combination of the right environment and personal...
Read the essayNote: The TL;DR of this post is I built a thing with AI, you can check it out here
Read the essayOver the last six months, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Tailscale community - helping users debug issues, answering questions about how we sell the product and explaining, repeatedly, how we think about the business behind it.
Read the essayYou can’t escape it. Everywhere you turn in the tech ecosystem, AI is there.
Read the essayEvery year, I gear up for “conference season,” which includes KubeCon NA (typically held between mid-October and mid-November) and AWS re:Invent, always the week after Thanksgiving in the US. As a sales engineer, this time of year is exhilarating. It’s a chance...
Read the essayDo you ever really think about how you get access to your Kubernetes control plane? Whatever mechanism you use to provision your cluster, you get a KUBECONFIG and usually just go on your merry way to overcomplicating your infrastructure.
Read the essayLoad Balancers are expensive.
Read the essayEarlier this year, I attended CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent and listened to Adam Jacob’s “What if Infrastructure as Code never existed” keynote.
Read the essayIf you’ve read this blog before, or are unfortunate enough to have an actual personal relationship with me, you’ll know that I have strong opinions and can be, shall we say, passionate about them. For posts on this blog, I try to...
Read the essayIf you’re thinking of migrating to another infrastructure as code tool (and why would you, everything is great in the IaC world now, right?!) you might find yourself asking yourself a fundamental question when you get started: how do I structure things...
Read the essayOne of my favourite things about AWS is their ability to make the wrong decision easy and the right decision hard. Our world is moving towards managed services and “off the shelf” experiences for provisioning infrastructure and deploying applications. AWS itself has...
Read the essayNote: I am a Pulumi employee which means I have an agenda when writing this post. That said, my intent here is to accurately describe the state of the Infrastructure as Code market, so will endeavour to be objective with my opinions....
Read the essayNote: If you read the title and thought ‘I know what declarative and imperative mean!’ note that I’m employing hyperbole as a comedic device and I’m aware lots of people know what the words mean
Read the essayIt’s probably difficult for most people to recall the first time they heard a word, but I remember hearing the word “DevOps” for the first time. I was having a beer with a colleague in 2013 who has taught me almost everything...
Read the essaySomething I miss after emigrating from the UK to the USA is the using the name of a yeast extract based spread as an adjective. To describe something as “marmite” is to indicate that people either “love it” or “hate it”, and...
Read the essayIt’s been over 3 years since I published my most successful blog post about the abject horror of templated yaml and in many ways, I feel the same way now as I did then, with the exception of falling out of love...
Read the essayPicture the scene. You’re configuring your automation pipelines, whether it’s deploying infrastructure, applications or any other piece of your CI/CD pipeline that needs to access a cloud provider. You want to do things properly, so you define a well scoped role with...
Read the essayEngaging with the Pulumi community has been one of the most enjoyable parts of my time so far at Pulumi. If you’ve used the Pulumi Community Slack or asked about Pulumi on Twitter, Reddit or Stack Overflow there’s a reasonable chance interacted...
Read the essayBuilding reusable abstractions is one of the most important and rewarding parts of any infrastructure as code journey. Allowing users to be able to quickly define infrastructure from well defined, repeatable patterns can quickly help your community grow.
Read the essayIf you’ve never written in-depth, production ready software in your programming language of choice, you might never have come across asynchronous programming. I managed to spend several years as an infrastructure type person and hadn’t ever really written any tool or software...
Read the essayWhile doing my usual mid-morning Twitter shill exercise for my employer last week, a twitter user slid into my replies and asked me an interesting question:
Read the essayNote: This post is about Pulumi who is now my employer. If you don’t want to hear about that, look away now. Note: Some images have been redacted to protect the innocent
Read the essayThe year is 2020, and the US election is a matter of days away. While the world deals with an unprecedented pandemic and Americans on both sides of the aisle fight for what they believe to be the very soul of their...
Read the essayIf you’ve used Terraform before, migrating to Pulumi is often an exhilarating experience. Since I started working at Pulumi back in March, I’ve heard countless stories from users about how adopting Pulumi has changed the way their organizations work and allowed them...
Read the essayNote: An advanced warning: I recently changed companies and now work for Pulumi, which I’ll be discussing here. If you don’t want to hear about that, look away now.
Read the essayAt $work, we have several Kubernetes clusters across different geographical and AWS regions. The reasons range from customer requirements, to our own desire to reduce operational “blast radius” issues that might come up. Our team has experience large outages before, and we...
Read the essayI’ve been building a Kubernetes based platform at $work now for almost a year, and I’ve become a bit of a Kubernetes apologist. It’s true, I think the technology is fantastic. I am however under no illusions about how difficult it is...
Read the essayI was at cfgmgmtcamp 2019 in Ghent, and did a talk which I think was well received about the need for some Kubernetes configuration management as well as the solution we built for it at $work, kr8.
Read the essayTL;DR: - go here
Read the essayPrevious visitors to this blog will remember I wrote about configuration mgmt for Kubernetes clusters, and how the space was lacking. For those not familiar, the problem statement is this: it’s really hard to maintain and manage configuration for components of multiple...
Read the essayServerless computing is all the rage at the moment, and why wouldn’t it be? The idea of deploying code without having to worry about anything like servers, or that pesky infrastructure everyone complains about seems pretty appealing. If you’ve ever used AWS...
Read the essayA few months back, I wrote an article which got a bit of interest around the issues configuring and maintaining multiple clusters, and keeping the components required to make them useful in sync. Essentially, the missing piece of the puzzle was that...
Read the essayIt’s been over a year since my last blog post, and since then I’ve been working on Kubernetes almost exclusively for $employer. During that time, I’ve noticed a growing need for something that many people in the DevOps/SRE/Sysadmin world take for granted....
Read the essayDay 3 of Kubecon! Before I begin, I have to make it clear that this was another day of frustration for me. As it was yesterday, all of the talks I really wanted to see were completely overflowing, and this was despite...
Read the essayDay 2 of KubeCon was absolutely jam packed! There were lots of tracks, so I won’t be able to cover everything that happened, but hopefully I can recap some of the stuff I found interesting.
Read the essayI was lucky enough to be able to attend CloudNativeCon/Kubecon in Berlin, Germany. This is my recap of the first half day of lightning talks, panels and project updates.
Read the essayKubernetes has a reputation for being great for stateless application deployment. If you don’t require any kind of local storage inside your containers, the barrier to entry for you to deploy on Kubernetes is probably very, very low. However, it’s a fact...
Read the essayIn the previous post, I went over some basics of how Kubernetes networking works from a fundamental standpoint. The requirements are simple: every pod needs to have connectivity to every other pod. The only differentiation between the many options were how that...
Read the essayI have some problems with Kubernetes.
Read the essayOne of the first tools I came across when I started out in the IT industry was SmokePing. It’s been around for years and solves the important job of graphing latency between two points in a reasonable way. As a company grows...
Read the essayEvery company that uses Puppet eventually gets to the stage in their development where they want to store “secrets” within Puppet. Usually (hopefully!) your Puppet manifests and data will be stored in version control in plaintext and therefore adding these secrets to...
Read the essayI love Gitlab. With every release they announce some amazing new features and it’s one of the few software suites I consider to be a joy to use. Since we adopted it at $job we’ve seen our release cycle within the OPS...
Read the essayWe’re finally beginning to build out our production Kubernetes infrastructure at work, after some extensive testing in dev. Kubernetes relies heavily on TLS for securing communications between all of the components (quite understandably) and while you can disable TLS on many components,...
Read the essaySo you’ve decided you want to use Configuration Management to control your infrastructure. You’ve read about all of the benefits of “infrastructure as code” and you’ve decided you’re going to Puppet as your chosen configuration management tool.
Read the essayIn my last post I wrote about service discover with my Puppetmasters using consul
Read the essayI had a problem recently. I’m deploying services, and everything is Puppetized, but I have to manually tell other infrastructure that it exists. It’s frustrating. As an “ops guy” I focus on making my infrastructure services available, resiliant and distributed so that...
Read the essayIn my last post, I discussed sensu aggregates and server side checks and how to use them in order to monitor clusters or machines.
Read the essaySensu has really evolved into a first class monitoring tool, and the main reason for this is in part due to its flexibility and being able to solve monitoring problems in a way that suits you. Up until this point at $employer,...
Read the essaySensu has a lot of cool features, but some of them are rarely used because either the documentation isn’t massively clear, or people deem it a “bit hard”. One of these cool features is redaction of passwords. You may have seen many...
Read the essayAt {place of work}, in order to reduce our outband bandwidth, we do the sensible thing and mirror the CentOS repos locally in order to not, y’know, pull down a couple gig of RPM’s every time we do a server build. Obviously,...
Read the essayFor a long time, I ran a blog, wiki and static website on a VPS which I managed. As I finished education and started in the work force, I realised that managing a server in my spare time just wasn’t fun anymore,...
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