After a rocky start, Terraform has become a great success story where I am. We've got both infrastructure and development teams using it, sharing both learnings and resources such as modules and code. A consequence of that is I spent quite a lot of my time helping people get started »
I've just finished what was a very rough journey into a fully-automated deployment infrastructure at a large scale. At times it felt more like I was in a bizarre far-future version of a Victorian penny dreadful, complete with roguish charlatans and cliff-hanger disasters. But we battled through it all and »
For about a decade I struggled with the common problem of environments. You usually start off with some well-meaning attempt at a simple layout, with development, integration, staging and live. Which feels fine, until you realise your company has different release cycles for software and data. So you split up »
There's a lot of buzz around about exposing services as chatbots. Whether that's interactive chats to help you book travel, or a simple Slack bot that lets you run a build, they're turning up everywhere. (Although as usual, nothing on the Internet is truly new: old hands will remember things »
I have a bit of a counter-intuitive opinion on cloud services and the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) world. For me, something like AWS isn't about "big". Yes, I know plenty of companies use elastic scaling to run huge, demand-based infrastructures along the Netflix model. But for rest of us, we're not building »
It's pretty common to want to load balance a web application across multiple nodes. The canonical implementation looks something like this: Traffic comes in from the public Internet to the load balancer, which then distributes it amongst the available application servers. There are various tricks you can employ on top »