Gareth Brown

Gareth Brown

Saturday, 03 April 2021 12:01

Technology Musings Episode 5

This episode's thoughts on Google Kubernetes Engine and Scrum for DevOps Teams:

  • Google Cloud GKE Autopilot for improve security at reduced cost
  • Getting more done in your DevOps team sprints

 

Monday, 01 March 2021 17:49

February 2021 Technology Musings

This month's thoughts are around:

  • Google Cloud Growth Continues to Accelerate
  • Why Aren't You Testing Your Infrastructure Deployment Code?

 

Sunday, 10 January 2021 12:51

January 2021 Technology Musings

 This month's thoughts are a series of articles in a tale of technical debt:

  • The Cost of Poor Software Quality
  • Planning for Technical Debt
  • Developer Working Patterns During a Pandemic

 

Thursday, 31 December 2020 15:22

December 2020 Technology Musings

 This month's thoughts are around:

  • Unused resource management on The Cloud
  • The cost of operations for startups
  • Are your IT services portable?

 

Tuesday, 17 November 2020 16:58

November 2020 Technology Musings

 This month's thoughts are around:

  • Digital rights management and open source
  • Protecting your business against service downtime
  • Trusted computing on Cloud infrastructure 

 

Monday, 13 March 2017 12:57

The Concierge Paradigm

 

Containers have been around now for quite a few years. We can trace the concept back to 1979 and the introduction of the chroot system call but it wasn't until BSD JailsSolaris Zones and LXC in 2000, 2004 and 2008 when the technology started to mature. Zones in particular became incredibly stable very early on. With a very high level of isolation and performance, capable of multi-tenancy systems.

With the rise of VMWare and IaaS providers like AWS, container technologies took a back seat as the masses embraced cloud computing.  Containers weren't fully able to satisfy the demands of ephemeral and dynamically scaling systems. However, in more recent years Docker has revitalised the interest back in this technology by introducing the idea of application containers and a powerful set of tools and infrastructure for maintaining container images.

Expanding the benefits beyond performance and resource utilisation gains, Docker improved standardisation, configuration management and portability, meaning containers are fast becoming the next hot technology (if they're not already). However, they do maintain some challenges in the Cloud. Specifically monitoring, orchestration (e.g. automated scheduling and auto-scaling) and service discovery are an additional burden.

Tuesday, 14 February 2017 12:04

What is DevOps?

What we mean by "operations," has changed over the years and some ambiguity has resulted from the pace of change. I'd like to discuss some of these changes.

Firstly, let me explain why I believe I know a little on the subject. I want to invite you to come back in time to the Technology Management Centre for a large Telco in the early 00s where a young man has just sat down for his first day on the job and his supervisor, Spencer hands him a drive bay (hot desking was serious business here) and says, "I recommend you do a stage 1 install of Gentoo because it'll will be a good learning exercise to set up the Operaing System from scratch. Then, when you're done, we'll go over this script I'm working on to automate some tests on our new Cisco 10K routers."

I'd never compiled an operating system before that point, so we never made it to the script but it was the first time in my career when I was suddenly plunged into a world of highly skilled engineers and architects, simply doing some amazing things under very tight requirements and needing to be "DevOps", just to ensure their success. Scripting and automating tests, building our own configuration management system, measuring everything that moved, working cross-functionally, high collaboration and information sharing across teams were all just the norm. We'd also virtualised our environments and were even running containers in production over ten years ago.

From that point, my work career continued in much the same way. Sure, there has been some challenges trying to help some people see the vision but now there is a DevOps community and a wealth of literature, those challenges mostly went away and the approach was less about pushing an agenda to simply agreeing with peoples ideas as they embraced the philosophies as well.

Where did it all start

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About Mesoform

For more than two decades we have been implementing solutions to wasteful processes and inefficient systems in large organisations like TiscaliHSBC and HMRC, and impressing our cloud based IT Operations on well known brands, such as RIMSonySamsung and SiriusXM... Read more

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