DevOps

On the 24th of September 2019, I had an opportunity to speak at the very first DevOps Roundabout meetup in London. You can watch my talk on YouTube. The idea behind this talk is the same as the one behind my whitepaper (with the identical title). First, explaining to the wider audience what the DevOps movement is really all about and then helping people to embark on that journey. The difference in the talk is that I do not focus specifically on the public sector and think in broader terms- how everyone can embark on this journey. ...

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is one of the most important services available in AWS. Most people know that you can create user accounts and assign permissions (policies). In this blog post, I will look at a few more advanced features of the AWS IAM. AWS policies can have conditions AWS policies can have conditions. That means that you can apply a policy that would only work in a specific time window. This can be for example next Wednesday between 1 pm and 4 pm if you expect a user to need specific permission around this time. In general, you can use these conditions to grant and revoke permissions to do things at specific dates and times. ...

Working for consultancy, I already had a chance to build microservice based systems in large financial organisations as well as public sector ones. When sharing my experience with other developers, there is one topic that often comes up- many people wished that they had a service mesh from the start! In this article, I will explain what a service mesh is and why is it so useful! Service mesh defined A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that helps with managing your service to service communication. It is often implemented as a lightweight reverse-proxy using the sidecar pattern, deployed in a separate container. The two most popular implementations are currently Istio and Linkerd (which absorbed Conduit). ...

You probably heard about Ops, DevOps, maybe even about GitOps! This short article is a “jargon buster” explaining what all these different terms mean and which ones you should pay attention to. Ops This is a shorthand for IT Operations. That means running software, providing support and administrating networks and servers. Basically most of the important day-to-day IT business that is not testing or development. An interesting, but the wrong trend these days is to simply re-name your Operations team as DevOps team, pat each other on the back and think that you are following best practices… If only life was that easy! ...

I am quite excited to share with you “The Journey to DevOps” (announcement and the download link here), the first white paper that I have published with my company Scott Logic. This white paper will help you: Understand the DevOps mindset Learn more about challenges facing public sector organisations when adopting DevOps Help you assess your DevOps maturity Present actionable advice on embarking on your DevOps journey Appreciate the value that comes from embracing DevOps If you are interested in reading more, download our white paper from Scott Logic blog: “The Journey to DevOps” – in PDF format.

Machine Learning and its applications are getting more popular every day. For many developers, building a machine learning powered application seems like a daunting task- all this learning, data collection, and computing power needed! In reality, it is not as difficult as it sounds- as long as you harness “the power of the Cloud”… In this article, I want to tell you about different machine learning services provided by AWS and give some ideas about how you could use them! Ready to get inspired? Let’s go! ...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the most popular Cloud solution out there. More and more companies are using it every day. It makes development easier, safer, cheaper and better. Since it is becoming an expectation for backend developers to be familiar with AWS (or other Cloud solutions) I compiled here some of the best resources and ideas for learning it. What does it mean to learn AWS? Before learning AWS, it is worth thinking what you want to get out of that learning. Are you more interested in designing solutions or actually working with some of the cloud services provided? AWS recognizes three key ways of learning AWS: ...

Kafka is becoming a popular addition to microservice oriented architectures. Despite its popularity, it may be tricky to run it on your development machine- especially if you run Windows. In this short article, I will show you a simple way to run Kafka locally with Docker. In order to run Kafka, you need a Zookeeper instance and Kafka instance. You also need these two instances to be able to talk to each other. ...

Spring Cloud Data Flow requires quite a few dependencies in order to run it. In this blog post, I will show you Docker Compose tool and how it can be used to make that setup easy. I have written an introduction to Spring Cloud Data Flow where in order to run the Data Flow server, you need to have 3 other Docker containers running. This is not that bad, but imagine if you had to have more dependencies? Or if you want to have that process easily replicable? Sharing that setup with other developers on the team? You can see that it would be good to have a better way of doing this… ...

Every now and then you read a book that completely changes how you understand something. “The Phoenix Project” (Amazon) changed how I understand DevOps and driving positive transformations in companies. Keep reading to see why I think everyone working in the software industry should read this book. The DevOps revolution I believe that as of 2018 the whole software industry is going through a DevOps revolution, similar to the Agile revolution that already took place. ...