People used to think software development was “done” when the code was written and passed all its tests. But modern IT systems aren’t done until they are online, running, and integrated with their data feeds, storage, networks, and administration systems. This can involve very elaborate operations steps, such as dynamically creating a whole array of […]
Despite overall Elasticsearch stability, it is still possible for a cluster to get into a “red” state. One of the reasons for that to happen is if an index becomes corrupt. This can be caused by an abrupt loss of power, hardware failure or—more commonly—running out of disk space. In this post we’ll discuss how […]
Today I was working on a client project when a seemingly innocent refactoring made the program 2x faster. Of course, being happy about the improvement and going on with my life would have been wrong, as random performance improvements almost always mean that something foul is at play. I undid the refactoring step by step, […]
What are Docker Containers? Docker containers are a form of “lightweight” virtualization They allow a process or process group to run in an environment with its own file system, somewhat like chroot jails , and also with its own process table, users and groups and, optionally, virtual network and resource limits. For most purposes, the […]
How to Know if Hiring a DevOps Consultant is Right for Your Business DevOps is a set of tools and methods to get your applications from Dev through Deployment to Operations. It automates a reliable path from my app runs on one machine to my app is online for all users and data, secure, scalable, […]
If you ask ten engineers how they measure the success of their DevOps strategy you are likely to get ten different answers. Success is measured differently by different people, so it’s not unusual to observe these different perspectives. What is the DevOps value proposition? This blog will explore a number of things to consider when […]
NAT Gateways in Amazon GovCloud So you’re deploying your government-sensitive data and services on GovCloud, or planning to and you want your data to be protected against third-party access, so you configure your subnets as private resources, without internet access. In other AWS regions, you could then add a managed NAT Gateway and instances would have, […]
DevOps Challenges I managed an eight-person team that supported data integration tools for a Fortune 100 tech company. One of the tools we supported was adopted by every business unit to integrate a large number of applications, database, and information repositories together. Over a period of 7 – 8 years the number of production integration […]
Users of Amazon Web Services are used to having Route53 available to provide DNS records within their clouds. However, if you’re a government contractor or an agency, your deployments likely live on an Amazon GovCloud environment. And on that environment, Route53 is not yet available. So does that mean you should forego deploying any services […]
What I would have wanted to know about AWS GovCloud While assisting a US municipal government with their cloud migration, we recently had the opportunity to deploy a complete hosting platform to the GovCloud Region. Our task was to provide a platform based on kubernetes, running within a secure VPC built on private subnets and with […]