2016 Top Ten

So here they are, my top ten albums of 2016. Like last year they are all ones I physically own rather than stream or have brought digitally … The full list is below (I know there are 30) … David Bowie — Blackstar Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool Knifeworld — Bottled Out Of Eden British Theatre — Mastery Charles Bradley — Changes Kate Bush — Before The Dawn The Anchoress — Confessions Of A Romance Novelist Matt Berry — The Small Hours The Sea Nymphs — On The Dry Land Crippled Black Phoenix — Bronze S U R V I V E — RR7349 Iamthemorning — Lighthouse Three Trapped Tigers — Silent Earthling Gong — Rejoice!...

December 12, 2016 · 2 min · Russ Mckendrick

Annoying Ansible Quirk

I am not sure if this a bug or not, but I spent an hour scratching my head today trying to figure out why part of playbook which was working seemingly suddenly stopped. I have a playbook which executes each morning to create a staging version of a site from the previous night’s snapshots. Each weekday morning at 0730am it … Bootstraps an AWS environment (VPC, ELB and all the other acronyms) Launches a RDS instance from the previous nights snapshot Launches an instances and deploys an application and then creates an AMI Creates an auto-scaling group and launches three instances using the new AMI behind an ELB The base operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 which does not ship with any AWS tools installed by default, so before the tasks which start interacting with the instance and application I run the following;...

November 19, 2016 · 4 min · Russ Mckendrick

Pre-Order Docker Data Management with Flocker

Note This book was scrapped just before it was due to be published due to the Flocker project loosing its funding and folding. I am pleased to say that my third book is now available to pre-order from Packt external link , Amazon UK external link & Amazon US external link . The book is released in the new year. However, if you purchase from Packt, you will get early access external link to the ebook....

November 7, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

October 2016 Playlist

I have been writing a lot again this month so not a lot to post, however, I have been listening to a lot of music … You can listen to it all here …

October 30, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

50% Off Today Only

The two books I wrote about Docker are available for 50% off today from the Packt web site, click here to goto the deal external link .

October 2, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

Amazon Web Services with Ansible

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 ....

September 11, 2016 · 8 min · Russ Mckendrick

Whats on the deck September 2016

Its been a while since I have posted a playlist, so I thought I would do one of all of the coloured vinyl I have been playing over the last few months … Here are some pictures of them in their full glory …

September 10, 2016 · 1 min · Russ Mckendrick

Docker for Amazon Web Services Beta

Yesterday the following email dropped into my inbox … … I spend a lot of the day job looking at and talking about Amazon Web Services (AWS) so this had got my interest. In my last book external link I covered Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS) and I have to admit that it wasn’t the most greatest service Amazon had released, especially compared the ease you can now launch Swarm Clusters using Docker....

August 12, 2016 · 6 min · Russ Mckendrick