Tag Archives: cloudcomputing

IaC – What it is, and Why it Matters

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Infrastructure as Code (IaC) refers to the practice of managing and provisioning IT infrastructure through code rather than through manual processes. With IaC, infrastructure configurations—such as servers, networks, databases, and security settings—are written in machine-readable code and stored in version-controlled repositories. This approach enables the automation of infrastructure management, which is both repeatable and consistent, eliminating human errors and ensuring that the infrastructure is always in a known, desired state.

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Containers & Orchestration

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Container orchestration refers to the automated management of containerized applications across clusters of machines. It involves processes like deployment, scaling, load balancing, and networking, ensuring that containers run efficiently in distributed environments. The goal is to abstract away the complexities of handling multiple containers and their interdependencies, enabling seamless deployment and operation at scale.

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Back Up and Running in Cloud Native

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Finally had the time to rebuild and refresh the blog site. gotsudo.com in now full Cloud Native running in AWS (has always been, however in a more traditional server-based installation).

The recent migration included an AWS Lightsail service that provides various bundles of OS/applications, which in my case is WordPress running on Linux. Various tiers are also available to fit every budget out there.

I decided to take things a step further, and serve the public facing version of the website in a static configuration, leveraging AWS S3 to host the site files, with AWS CloudFront caching layer sitting upfront for the parent gotsudo.com address.

This allows me to limit access to the actual WordPress site running in Lightsail, transforming it to a true authoring and publishing site, rather than a public front-facing one.

Various WordPress plugins are available that can easily produce a static version of the website, and can also integrate with AWS services (or any other CSP) to auto publish files into S3 or any other repository of choice. While these make things much easier and more integrated, I decided to air-gap the systems, allowing me to selectively produce the published files and upload them to S3 using other means of tailored automation.

Later on, I may add some more integrations to the site, however at this point I’m quite happy with how far it came over a busy weekend’s time.

Feels like yesterday…

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Feels like it was just yesterday when…

We transformed how a full-house inventory exercises were performed across warehouses, for an international book and magazine distribution business.

The solution we introduced included handheld PDAs running Windows CE, with bar-code scanning attachments, hooked up to a custom designed broad WiFi “mesh” network (before modern mesh WiFi became a thing you can buy), backed by a LAMP server hosting the inventory web front-end and database.

This setup was a game changer to the inventory team, as it reduced the amount of time it took to complete their yearly exercise from a multi-week effort to just a few days.

Bear in mind this was before the age of cloud computing, smart phones, 4G/5G networks, lightweight laptops and tablets.

To me, the level of excitement, the dropped jaws on the faces of all team members, senior management, and executive stakeholders, was the payoff to the work we did. It was quite the fun project to be a part of.

This was back in 2003. How time flies by…

Automate all the things?

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Look… we get it; it’s easy to get carried away with the “let’s automate this, let’s automate that, let’s automate everything!” enthusiasm.

Before you go ahead and commit your team to a ton of automation work spanning the foreseeable sprints, it is best to have a sit down with your leads and establish an outline of all domains in which automation makes sense, prioritize those where repetitive high-frequency tasks reside, reduce hours consumed by your in-house skill overwhelmed by running routine tasks, and work your way down that list.

The last thing any directive would want is for their team spending months on an automation build-out, only to no longer be needed due to product life-cycle deprecation.

The goal of automation is to simplify and streamline workflow, reduce overhead, and allow skill to be leveraged where it is needed most… and that is not, in troubleshooting automation complexity issues.