Over the last 20 years I've had numerous personal websites running many different platforms. What interests me about it is how those platform have gone through a transition of becoming more complex and then seeimingly going full circle back to simplicity.

The tale goes a little like this...

Handcrafted ...

So last week I had the pleasure of attending my second AWS re:Invent in sunny Las Vegas. Keynotes were listened too, breakout sessions were attended, and drinking and gambling occured.

One thing that stuck with me from the keynote by Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels (day 2) was the bold ...

Blue/Green deployments are ever popular in the DevOps world these day. Do a quick Google search and you will find ample blogposts telling you how people do them and why they're a good thing.

You'll likely see references to Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble, Dan North, Martin Fowler ...

Yesterday I got a new work laptop. Actually when I say new it's really more of an upgrade. I've been using the original Dell XPS13 laptop for the past 3 years as my primary machine. It's one of those "ultrabooks" as they like to call them, basically ...

For the past week or so I've been working on our Cassandra clusters at work where we've been using cassandra-snapshotter to push our backups to S3 on a scheduled basis. The only problem with it has been that we execute the process from cron, and the tool is ...

I've just chucked the following onto GitHub should anyone want it. It's a little script that will get you the names of connected users on a Cisco ASA vpn via SNMP.

usage: asausers.py [-h] -f FIREWALL [-i IGNORE] -c COMMUNITY_STRING
                   [-o OUTPUT]

Get connected users from ASA ...

Don't get me wrong, of course Github is great, but its pricing model once you start to have a few users could be prohibitive, plus, like BitBucket, its "on the Internet", and this might be something that internal auditing in businesses might not allow for.

So what are the ...

Up until recently, and by virtue of using AWS for quite a while, I would always err on the side of caution when using EBS in production and punt for Provision IOPs (PIOPs) volumes. Obviously choosing the right number of PIOPs is crucial, although in fairness I think it might ...

For the past couple of days I've been ill, so I decided to read about GamerGate. After many hours of scratching my head about it all I came up with the following conclusions. No doubt this will piss some people off shrug

One of the rather nifty things with AWS is the ability to create autoscaling groups to handle surges in traffic when you're operating at scale. However, you don't have to just use auto-scaling to make the number of instances for an application larger, you can also use it ...