Tracer Bullet Pipeline
In order to get the team moving quickly, we’ve kicked this all off using what we’ve called a ‘tracer bullet’ (or ‘trail marker’, for a less violent image). T...
Posts by Category
concepts
Infrastructure as Data
Infrastructure as Data integrates declarative infrastructure management into a Kubernetes cluster, so you can write infrastructure code and use it with the K...
Structuring code repositories
Given that you have multiple code projects, should you put them all in a single repository in your source control system, or spread them among more than one?...
Unpacking Dan North’s CUPID properties for joyful coding
Dan North has recently published his long-awaited list of CUPID properties for making software a joy to work with. Dan teased CUPID almost a year earlier in ...
The Snowflakes as Code antipattern
One of the earliest benefits that drew people like me to infrastructure as code was the promise of eliminating snowflake servers.
Why your team doesn’t need to use pull requests
Github introduced the pull request practice, and features to support it, to make it easier for people who run open-source projects to accept contributions fr...
DevOps, SRE, GitOps, Observability: My take on some current-ish buzzwords
Blog posts about “What is DevOps” are a dime a dozen. I find myself repeating my 0.8 cent version of this, and other buzzwords that people knock around these...
Platform service models
Many of our clients at ThoughtWorks are building internal services for development teams to use in developing, delivering, and running applications. I’m ofte...
Term: Infrastructure Stack
The term Infrastructure Stack is something I’ve found useful to explain different patterns for organizing infrastructure code. An infrastructure stack is a c...
Using Pipelines to Manage Environments
Tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager Templates, Google Cloud Deployment Manager Templates and OpenStack Heat are a great way to d...
Different models for updating servers
A key part of any team’s infrastructure management approach is how to make changes to existing servers.
Dynamic Infrastructure Platforms
A dynamic infrastructure platform is a fundamental requirement for Infrastructure as Code. I define this as “a system that provides computing resources, part...
Why Infrastructure as Code
The thumbnail definition that I trot out for Infrastructure as Code is using development practices and tools to manage infrastructure. This sounds like a nat...
Mechanical Sympathy and the Cloud
My former colleague Martin Thompson borrowed the term Mechanical Sympathy from Formula One driver Jackie Stewart and brought it to IT. A successful driver li...
The Automation Fear Spiral
At an open spaces session on configuration automation at a DevOpsDays a year or two ago, I asked the group how many of them were using an automation tools li...
What is Infrastructure as Code?
Systems administrators have probably been writing scripts and tools to make their jobs easier since day one. When I joined my first systems team, the mantra ...
book
New Early Release chapters for Infrastructure as Code 3rd edition
O’Reilly has published several new chapters in the Early Release of the third edition of the Infrastructure as Code book. That’s fifteen out of twenty-one ch...
Early Release of Infrastructure as Code 3rd edition
I’ve been furiously typing away on the new edition of the book and now have a rough (very!) draft of the first eight chapters. You can get access to the Earl...
Second edition of Infrastructure as Code available now!
The second edition of Infrastructure as Code is out! Mostly. E-Books are available now (Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.in | O’Reilly), while the dead-tre...
Second Edition of Infrastructure as Code
I’ve delivered the second edition of the book to O’Reilly’s production department, and the wheels are turning to have it available by the end of the year. Se...
Announcing, the second edition of Infrastructure as Code
TL;DR: Go read the early release of the second edition of Infrastructure as Code on O’Reilly! This is the first eight chapters of what will probably be eight...
Infrastructure as Code has been published
Infrastructure as Code is officially published! The “Pre-order” buttons on Amazon.com and the O’Reilly shop have flipped to “Add to Cart” for both print and ...
To production and beyond
I’ve delivered the text of my book to O’Reilly’s production team, which means we’re on the path to publication! The last “early access” release should be ava...
ThoughtWorks sponsors free chapters for download
My employer, ThoughtWorks, is sponsoring a free download of three chapters of my upcoming book, “Infrastructure as Code”. These chapters focus on software en...
Update to early access Infrastructure as Code book
O’Reilly has pushed the latest update to the “early access” (i.e. rough draft) of my book-in-progress, Infrastructure as Code. You can buy the book now, gett...
Early Release is available!
I’m excited to announce that an “Early Access” (Raw and Unedited) version of the Infrastructure as Code book is now available for purchase from the O’Reilly ...
Wordle of the current draft
I ran my current draft of the book through wordle and got this:
Announcing - Infrastructure as Code, the book
I’ve run across many teams who are in the same place I was a few years ago, people who are using cloud, virtualization, and automation tools, but haven’t got...
talks
Talk at operability.io conference
Last week I gave a talk at the operability.io conference. This was a great conference, small (about 170 people), single track. I met a lot of people I know, ...
tools
Infrastructure project orchestration scripts and tools
Most infrastructure projects I’ve been involved with have a script, or usually a set of scripts that act like a build tool for software projects. These are o...