What is Crossplane? If you don’t already know, Crossplane is billed as an: Open source, CNCF project built on the foundation of Kubernetes to orchestrate anything. Encapsulate policies, permissions, and other guardrails behind a custom API line to enable your customers to self-service without needing to become an infrastructure expert. Another...
When I started my career as an engineer in the early noughties, I was very keen on developer experience (devex). So when I joined a company whose chosen language was TCL (no, really), I decided to ask the engineering mailing list what IDEs they used. Surely the senior engineers, with all their wisdom and experience, would tell … Continue reading...
This post was originally triggered – and I choose that word carefully – by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things had changed since I started working in software. As part of the project that provoked me, I was researching the topic of cloud cost analysis … Continue reading At...
As someone who has worked in software since 2001, and in the Cloud Native (containerisation and Kubernetes) space since 2013, I’m getting old enough to have seen trends come and go a few times. VMs came (and stayed), continuous integration went from a fad talked about by gurus to the mainstream of software delivery, and … Continue reading OK...
TL;DR I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules: The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, … Continue reading What I Learned Using...
Other Posts Pipes The pipe is the next-most used feature of jq after filters. If you are already familiar with pipes in the shell, it’s a very similar concept. How Important is this Post? Pipes are fundamental to using jq, so this section is essential to understand. We will cover: Setup Create a folder to … Continue reading Learn jq the Hard...
Other Posts Simple Filters In this section we introduce the most-frequently used feature of jq: the filter. Filters allow you to reduce a given stream of JSON to another smaller, more refined stream of JSON that you can then do more filtering or processing on on if you want. How Important is this Post? Filters … Continue reading Learn jq the Hard...
Other Posts jq This section introduces you to the jq command, starting with the simplest possible commands as well as a brief look at the most commonly-used flags. What is jq? jq is a program for parsing, querying, and manipulating JSON. More broadly, it’s a filter: it takes input and transforms it to output. It … Continue reading Learn jq the...
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 … Continue reading Learn jq the Hard...
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 … Continue reading Monoliths,...
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...
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 … Continue reading The...
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...
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 … Continue reading A Little Shell...