Blog

How much to include in your machine images.

It’s an old topic, but I think one worth revisiting. When automating server provisioning, how much do you put into the machine image and how much do you do at instance start time? First a bit of background. When provisioning servers in the cloud, you start from a machine image, in AWS terminology, an Amazon Machine Image or AMI. You can find community AMIs for all sorts of operating systems… Read More »How much to include in your machine images.

CRISP-DM, one AI/ML Lifecycle

This is meant to be a simple introduction to the CRISP-DM framework, just one of many artificial intelligence and machine learning lifecycles. There are numerous sources for deeper understanding. The CRISP-DM framework, the CRoss-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining, was created in 1996. The process consists of six major phases: Business Understanding Data Understanding Data Preparation Modeling Evaluation Deployment The sequence between the phases is not strict. The other circle… Read More »CRISP-DM, one AI/ML Lifecycle

On the Importance of Automation

It may be obvious to some, but automation is a key concept when moving to the cloud from a data center or on-premises model. Imagine if you will that it is 1999. Data centers were the only real option for hosting large scale business applications. Often, system administrators would build and configure each server individually and manually. This was a time consuming and error prone process. The result was often… Read More »On the Importance of Automation

Lessons from Leading a DevOps Team for a Global Application Platform

For two and a half years I was the technical lead responsible for the operational management of a global platform running a vendor provided software product for a Fortune 100 insurance company. That’s a mouthful. In simpler terms, we did DevOps for a vendor provided enterprise content management system. The team consisted of between 8-10 people, including 3-5 in Northern Ireland. This included a scrum master and product owner, so… Read More »Lessons from Leading a DevOps Team for a Global Application Platform

What is Immutable Infrastructure?

Immutable infrastructure is the idea that your servers can not and do not change. As opposed to mutable infrastructure, where servers can and do change. Mutable servers are what everyone who has ever had to manage a physical server did. You can’t throw away your hardware and replace it every time you need to make an update. A system administrator would go in and manually or via script update, for… Read More »What is Immutable Infrastructure?

What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?

Simply, the AWS Well-Architected Framework helps you understand the pros and cons of decisions you make while building systems on AWS. It is a set of best practices for building secure, high-performance, resilient and efficient infrastructure. These best practices are a distillation of years of observation of cloud based projects. There are 5 pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Operational excellence, security, reliability, performance excellence, and cost optimization. There are… Read More »What is the AWS Well-Architected Framework?