Recently my wife made fun of me for using the word “toil” in a discussion about work. I think she thought the term was archaic and my choice to use it was awkward, but it has become part of the lexicon of DevOps. It’s current usage comes from the...

I’ve never seen an IT department that didn’t have some secrets. I’m not talking about the root password here. I’m talking about skeletons in the closet…the kind that make systems managers lose sleep.

A Matter of Taste

DevOps is a philosophy for managing software products and services. It is not a checklist for development and deployment. Like food, DevOps is based on a combination of physical and cultural elements. If you compare DevOps to...

Building on my last blog, there are cases where transit gateways can allow you to significantly cut down on the number of resources that you deploy. In cases where those resources are lightly used, this can lead to a substantial reduction in costs....

Not terribly long ago, Amazon introduced Transit Gateways, a nifty service that simplifies AWS networking. A transit gateway (or TGW) acts like a lightweight router that can be used to connect multiple VPCs, potentially in multiple accounts,...

A Story From Another Century

A few years after its initial release, I had the opportunity to discuss development of Jini (more recently known as Apache River) with one of the lead software engineers on the project[1]. Jini has a very complex...

I have a friend who used to be a member of the MIT Blackjack Team. He's fond of making the assertion that he could "teach a stick of wood to count cards". It's obviously hyperbole, but the point is that it's not that hard to teach somebody to count...

I've been working on Unix systems in one form or another for, um, let's just say three decades or so. When it was new to me, not a day went by when I didn't learn something I hadn't seen before. Often, I would learn several new things in a day. Now...

If you’re an Ansible user you know that in order to automate various IT services, you’ve got to write a playbook machine to a particular configuration. For complicated environments it’s common, and even preferred, that you break the work of a...