Engineering, DevOps & Cloud Computing
Note: The TL;DR of this post is I built a thing with AI, you can check it out here Back in 2012 I joined a growing startup that sold SaaS software to its customers. For those of you reading who didn’t understand how the infrastructure world looked back then, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure were all relatively niche offerings at the time, Docker hadn’t been invented yet and most of the technologies you…
Over 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. It’s rewarding work. I genuinely enjoy it. But threaded through almost every conversation is the same quiet fear: “Eventually you’re going to take this away from me,…
You can’t escape it. Everywhere you turn in the tech ecosystem, AI is there. Whether you’re an AI skeptic or an AI convert, you almost certainly understand how explosive the change in the tech ecosystem has been, and how fast everything is moving right now. I’ll keep my personal opinions about AI generally out of this blog most (mostly) but I’ve been staying very familiar with the Model Context…
Every 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 to speak with customers, prospects, and technology leaders in the ever-evolving cloud-native and cloud computing spaces. While I usually…
Do 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. However, if you’ve ever looked at your KUBECONFIG you’ll see you have a server address. You can check the health of your cluster by doing the following: curl -k…
Load Balancers are expensive. If you’re using Kubernetes, they are also a necessity. Figuring out how to expose a Kubernetes workload to the world without a Load Balancer is a bit like trying to make a sandwich without bread. You can do it, but nobody is going to want to deal with it. If you’re a startup trying to get your project off the ground, firstly, why are you using Kubernetes? Stop.…
Earlier this year, I attended CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent and listened to Adam Jacob’s “What if Infrastructure as Code never existed” keynote. Note: I’d like to extend a huge thanks to Adam for taking the time to review this post, and for an unnamed person for consistently reviewing these posts and for inspiring the thoughts here. Not only is Adam an excellent speaker, but he can capture thoughts that…
If 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 share those opinions and avoid directly addressing the people who hold the opposing view. However there’s a schism happening in the infrastructure as code world at the…
If 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 in a way that scales well and stands the test of time? There’s no canonical answer. Everyone does things slightly different, and different tools…
One 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 gotten the memo with its introduction of services like AWS Proton , however its real value proposition is in its ability to provider…