Category: DevOps

  • If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try, again

    I’m back! It’s been literally years since my last blog post and I’ve been buried in work, and home life – oh, and of course that whole pandemic thing going on. Got married? Check.Had a child? Check.Did a whole bunch of DevOps stuff I can block about? Big ol’ check. CloudFront announced last spring the […]

  • The Wrath of Kahn: Introducing Known Issues into the Public Cloud

    I’ve spent the last few months going into some technical aspects of DevOps here, and I’m going to pivot a little bit this week and go back to a more philosophical DevOps topic. A colleague today swung by my desk to get an opinion on a situation, and it basically shakes down to this: If […]

  • Making Snowflakes: Avoiding Collisions in CloudFormation Stack Outputs

    Generally speaking I’m pretty lucky because all our micro services operate in their own accounts (check out AWS Super Glue: The Lambda Function for why we do this) and I don’t have to worry too much about uniqueness of AWS resources. There are a few exceptions of course for resources that must be unique across the […]

  • Crash Test Dummy: Building, and Testing Angular Apps in AWS CodeBuild

    As part of an upcoming post around how we achieved Blue/Green functionality within AWS for I wanted to cover off a bit of a technical hurdle we overcame this week around how to build and test a web app in AWS CodeBuild. So what’s the big deal? AWS CodeBuild lets you use a whole bunch […]

  • AWS Super Glue: The Lambda Function

    About halfway through our development cycle, in a meeting with our AWS Solutions Architect we received what we affectionately refer to as the “AWS Bomb”. Up until that point we had been developing our platform with the idea that all the micro services and resources required to run them all should exist within a single […]

  • This is How We DevOps

    I realized that in writing this blog, I assumed that everyone knew why the DevOps model is so important, and what CI/CD means, and why we do it. That’s probably a bad assumption. As a new(ish) development ethos, DevOps isn’t widely adopted and it can be difficult to sell DevOps as a revolution in development […]

  • Word of the Day: Outage

    Captains log, April 20th 2018. It’s day ??? of winter. I’ve packed my entire desk up and decided to move to Sunnyvale. There’s no way there’s winter in a place that has “Sunny” in the name of the city right? Well, obligatory crappy weather complaint aside…let’s get on to today’s topic, everyone’s favourite word – […]