There are lots of ways to enable self-service VMs within an organisation - what some might call 'a private cloud'. However, these usually require layers and layers of complex software. What if you could leverage your existing hypervisor and 15 lines of code to do the same? And what if those 15 lines became an even simpler single click? more ...
Service discovery is one of those things that can be extremely handy to have, yet difficult to implement in a simple fashion. There are lots of tools out there to help, but I wanted to make something simple and easy to maintain for my specific use case. So here's the way I've done it, using a couple of DNS records and Ansible Tower. more ...
On December 3rd I did a talk about Ansible to the DevOps Exchange London meetup. It was targeted at introducing people to Ansible, and showing how it is so much more than just configuration management. more ...
At the end of January and start of February next year are two events, FOSDEM and cfgmgmtcamp. If you're an Ansible user and would like to speak at one or even both events, then read this post from my colleague at Ansible, Greg DeKoenigsberg.
more ...The UNIX philosophy. There are some wise words here.
more ...In the summer of 2013 I worked on a project that introduced me to Ansible. I was so impressed by it that I wrote a blog post. I found Ansible to be different to the catalog of software that constantly tries to grab our attention these days, and I've pretty much evangelised it since. more ...
A colleague was asking me questions today about Ansible playbooks, roles, tasks etc and how they translated from Puppet nomenclature (he is coming to Ansible with Puppet experience - much the same as I did actually). He thought it would be handy to have a 'translation guide'. more ...
On July 23rd I gave a talk at the London Splunk User Group on automating Splunk with Ansible. You can find the slides here. more ...
You know what, I am starting to despair of the IT industry, just a little bit. more ...
On July 2nd I gave a talk at DevOps Cardiff related to the blog post I wrote last year, on Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible. more ...