1. Get Back...Together?

    What we can learn from The Beatles about creativity and leadership in a remote-first world. …


  2. 4 Things I Learned About Outsourcing Whilst Decorating

    A few days spent up a ladder during the hottest weekend of the year so far gave me plenty of time to think about the benefits of getting the professionals in. …


  3. Launch Templates, T2 Unlimited and T3 Instances with CloudFormation

    AWS Launch Templates were announced fairly quietly in late November 2017 (I know I missed the announcement!) but it seems that Launch Templates are going to be quite a key piece to the EC2 puzzle going forwards, possibly replacing Launch Configurations completely. A reason I think this is that (at the time of writing) the new configuration options for T3 instances (CPU Credit Options) are only supported in Launch Templates and not Launch Configurations. …


  4. Custom Ansible Module Failing With Syntax Error

    Today has been spent debugging an issue that is quite hard to diagnose and easy to overlook. One of those that makes no sense whatsoever, with awful error messages that don’t help at all. …


  5. Find the latest AWS AMI with Ansible

    I am working on a project that builds on top of Windows Server 2016. One of the requirements I have is to ensure all Windows updates are installed on Windows Server before I install the application. …


  6. Sysprep Windows 2016 EC2 with Ansible

    Windows instances can be a funny beast and don’t always play ball with your automation intentions. I’m currently working on automating the build of a cluster of Microsoft AD servers and came across a problem when trying to join the second DC to the first. The problem? I had built these instances from the same custom AMI and hadn’t sysprepped them! …


  7. Ansible fails with ansible.vars.unsafe_proxy.AnsibleUnsafeText object

    Sometimes, we all have those days where you aare convinced your code is completely right and despite checking it over and over, you just can’t decipher what’s wrong with it. Today was one of those days. …


  8. Jinja default (omit) filter for Ansible

    I love the default (omit) jinja filter in Ansible. …


  9. Set Fact as list in Ansible

    I’ve just been battling with this one in Ansible so thought I’d post up the solution. …


  10. Automating Consul in AWS | Part 2 | Securing Consul

    In Part 2 of this Automating Consul in AWS series, we’re going to focus on securing our Cluster. We’ll look at some of the Consul features that can help us secure our cluster like gossip encryption, TLS authentication and disabling remote exec. I planned to incorporate ACL rules here too, but as Consul 0.8 has just been released, with improved ACL coverage, we’ll cover that in a seperate post. …