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It’s 2020 and my new years resolution is to keep a list of words that deserve to be on the naughty list: DevOps Agile Requirements It’s not that these words are inherently bad — but my industry has twisted, abused and polluted them leaving behind a trail of over-engineered solutions and misguided teams. For an …

A non-technical friend of mine approached me wanting to know everything they could about DevOps. He asked if he could have a few hours of my to pick my brain and ask me some questions. If only he know how much joy that brings me. So we used One DevOps Please as our springboard for the conversation. It worked well …

“One DevOps Please” — Part 1 recap: DevOps is part of a learning journey for people We can categorize how people learn in 4 Stages The hardest part of the learning process can be a willingness to learn Companies don’t transform just because we teach a handful of people in isolation (BottomUp) Organizational …

Some time after I got my first job “in DevOps” (I was one of those shiny new DevOps Engineers and really excited about the role) I distinctly remember a frank conversation with the Head of Delivery… I turned to him and said “You know DevOps isn’t real, right?” to which he replied “I know” (we were talking about job …

One DevOps Please — An Enterprise Journey to a DevOpsy-Cloud “I’ll have one DevOps please.” Over the last few years large organizations have been coming to consultants like myself to ask for help “Installing DevOps” into their organization. Some of them just want kubernetes clusters, while others are talking about …

Google App Engine is a pretty amazing service. You write code, and Google will make sure it runs, and scales well. This service was available way back in 2008, well before everyone was getting excited over lambdas and serverless. In my opinion, AppEngine is one of the most underrated services I’ve seen. It’s …

Are you strapped for time but wanting to learn Ansible? I’ve got your back! I’ve been using Ansible for several years now, and was first introduced to it as a replacement to Puppet. It didn’t take me long to learn, but it what really amazed me what how much more it could do! I’ve used Ansible to generate Cloudformation …

Okay, now that I have your attention let’s talk about Google App Engine for a minute and how you can achieve your DevOps dreams with a fully managed serverless application platform. App Engine history App Engine launched 10 years ago as a tool to run web applications on Google infrastructure. App Engine only supported …

Let’s talk about the real cost of cloud computing, and by that I don’t mean hourly pricing models, network charges, and licencing implications. I want to talk about opportunity cost, explore factors like speed to market, how effective our development teams can be, and the operational overheads involved in our …

This was an old blog post draft that I planned on cleaning up. In the end I decided to post it as the raw stream of thoughts that it is. Each one of these thoughts could be its own blog post. Things I learnt working for an I.T consultancy, doing the DevOps, building all the platforms, leading teams, and annoying a …