imiell Other Posts Introduction This jq series has been written to help users to get to a deeper understanding and proficiency in jq. It doesn’t aim to make you an expert immediately, but you will be more confident about using it and building your knowledge up from that secure base. You may well have already played … Read more
Recently an Amazon Prime Video (APV) article about their move from serverless tools to ECS and EC2 did the rounds on all the tech socials. A lot of noise was made about it, initially because it was interpreted as a harbinger of the death of serverless technologies, followed by a second wave that lashed back … Read more
Recently, in Container Solutions’ engineering Slack channel, a heated argument ensued amongst our engineers after a Pulumi-related story was posted. I won’t recount the hundreds of posts in the thread, but the first response was “I still don’t know why we still use Terraform”, followed by a still-unresolved ping-pong debate about whether Pulumi is declarative or imperative, followed by … Read more
Business strategy is very easy to get wrong. You’re trying to make sure your resources and assets are efficiently deployed and focussed on your end goal, and that’s hard. There’s no magic bullet that can help you both get the right strategy defined, and then successfully deliver on it, but there are many resources we’ve … Read more
At Container Solutions, we often work with large enterprises who are at various different stages of adopting cloud technologies. These companies are typically keen to adopt modern Cloud Native software working practices and technologies as itemised in our Maturity Matrix, so come to us for help, knowing that we’ve been through many of these transformation … Read more
Occasionally I run dumb stuff in the terminal. Sometimes something unexpected happens and it leads me to wonder ‘how the hell did that work?’ This article is about one of those times and how looking into something like that taught me a few new things about shells. After decades using shells, they still force me … Read more
The Problem Working in Cloud Native consulting, I’m often asked about who should do various bits of ‘the platform work‘. I’m asked this in various forms, and at various levels, but the title’s question (‘Who should write the Terraform?) is a fairly typical one. Consultants are often asked simple questions that invite simple answers, but … Read more
Having the privilege of working in software in the 2020s, I hear variations on the following ideas expressed frequently: ‘There must be some direct relationship between your work and customer value!’ ‘The results of your actions must be measurable!’ These ideas manifest in statements like this, which sound very sensible and plausible: ‘This does not … Read more
If you spend most of your days in a browser watching pipelines and managing pull requests, you may wonder why anyone would prefer the command line to manage their Git workflow. I’m here to persuade you that using the command line is better for you. It’s not easier in every case you will find, and … Read more
I originally got a 3D printer in order to indulge a love of architecture. A year ago I wrote about my baby steps with my printer, and after that got busy printing off whatever buildings I could find. After a few underwhelming prints of whatever buildings I could find, I stumbled on a site called … Read more