Services

OK, I focus on a few things.

• Ansible
• AWS
• Linux
• Terraform / Terraform Cloud
• CI/CD Automation with GitHub Actions / Bitbucket Pipelines / CircleCI
• Grafana and Prometheus

My languages of choice are:

• Python
• Bash
• JavaScript
• Svelte

For documentation, I use Markdown technology and Confluence style wiki systems for the ease of use and the distraction free nature of it.

AWS

I do most aspects of AWS but tend to focus on the core aspects, namely..

• S3 Storage : most people do most things with S3
• Lambda : The most underrated aspect of serverless compute in the history of computing
• API Gateway : The second most underrated aspect of serverless compute in the history of computing
• Cloudfront : Complex and pricey? Not at all. Build it into your CI/CD if you prefer
• RDS : Databases. Aurora ftw.
• SQS : Unbelievably underrated
• SNS : This is also one of my favourite AWS Services
• EC2 : Flexible, on-demand automated infrastructure
• CloudFormation : To have any hope of success in cloud infra, it must all be automated.
• Cost and cost reduction : Cash is king. To have any worthy success in cloud infra, minimize costs.

I’m only listing the services I use most often. There are many more, but these are the ones I use most often. Did I mention my qualifications?

Certification

Now, I’m straight into the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) Exam.

Terraform

Terraform for building, Ansible for furnishing. There’s a lot of crossover between Terraform and Ansible, so most likely you use Terrform for major parts of your infrastructure because of its seamless setup-teardown approach. I write Terraform Code for major structural block-building, especially where fast setup/tear-down is a must.

Ansible

Ansible is my favourite tool for system configuration because of its simple mechanism, no-client requirements and easy tooling. I love the stepwise constructs, the flexibility and some of the neater tricks you can do with it. I also like it’s ability to work with binaries that would otherwise be difficult to automate.

I write playbooks to configure complex setups in a repeatable idempotentic manner.

* And that’s it

Well, not really. I have been doing systems engineering since 1994 so I have plenty of experience in all things Microsoft especially enterprise Active Directory / DNS design, integration and development. This naturally extends to groups and group policy, domains, forests and the like and integration with cloud services for authentication and authorization.

Additionally, I have plenty of experience with routers, firewalls and networking and all your favourite protocols like BGP and intrusion detection with SNORT and open source stuff like that. I’ve been doing open source since about 1998 when I was trying to get Linux to install on Compaq hardware (and failing miserably).

My main focus is AWS but they’re not the only cloud provider. There is of course, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba, Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean and so on. Naturally, any large business will probably have involvement in all of these (e.g. Microsoft Active Directory) and so AWS has to play nicely with services contained therein. I will of course do integrations to make AWS work with these Cloud providers, but just so you know, they’re not my focus. I am aware that Terraform / Ansible etc., can easily interface with them and does a great job, but for me, AWS is the platform of choice.