Cloud

More and more I am having to not only think about how I would ensure that the infrastructure a service I am deploying on is highly available but also how I can manage its entire life-cycle in code. I have tried several tools for this such as Terraform external link, Puppet and Ansible, however over the last six months or so I have settled on Ansible. After I first looked at it back in December 2014 external link it has come on quite a lot, especially after the version 2 release at the start of this year external link....

As regular readers will know I really like the tools provided by Hashicorp external link and today I found an excuse to use one. I needed to bring up a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure external link. I hadn’t logged into Azure for quite a while so imagine my shock when I opened the dashboard, it’s not that great and the beta of the new one isn’t that brilliant either. It was so bad I tweeted about it …....

Last night I did some I haven’t done for a while and watched the opening episode of a new Dragons Den external link series while it was being aired. After a short time I found myself less interested in what was happening on screen and more interested in what was happening to the contestants (this is after all a primetime game show isn’t it?) websites during what should be a predicted spike in traffic....

I am currently using most of these tools day to day … Desktop Apps SublimeText external link — Still the best text editor around Dashline external link — Cross device password manager Desk external link — Great editor for writting blog posts Photoshop external link — For ermmmmm Photos OmniGraffle external link — For diagrams and stuff Reeder 2 external link — For reading all the feeds GitHub Mac Client external link — The Mac GitHub client Commandline Apps Home Brew external link — Install “missing” stuff on macs Cask external link — Install Mac Apps using the command line using Brew StormSSH external link — Key & hosts management known_hosts external link — A simple cli known hosts manager Packer external link — Build machine images Z external link — Jump around the CLI Vagrant external link — Run machines built with Packer Services Digital Ocean external link — Server Hosting AWS external link — Server Hosting CloudFlare external link — CDN & Stuff Github external link — Code Hosting Pinboard external link — Bookmarks Evernote external link — Note taking RememberTheMilk external link — Task management Feedly external link — For managing all the newsfeeds Pocket external link — For reading articles later Toggl external link — Time tracking Authy external link — A nice Two Factor Authentication tool Plex external link — An impressive cross device media centre … so not much in the way of changes since I last wrote external link about the tools I use....

As someone who deals with the word “Cloud” as part of their day job it can get very confusing. When a client or colleague says “I want cloud” or “what about hosting it in the cloud” what does it mean? Well, in my line of work it could mean any of the following …. Virtual Machines hosted on a highly available hardware platform Instances hosted in a an auto-scaling available configuration Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) for content Uploading static content Distributed Object Storage Software as a Service (SaaS) Platform as a Service (PaaS) Thats only a small list of what services which the word “Cloud” is used for....