I’ll be running my new talk “Designing For Rapid Release” at a couple of conferences in the first half of this year. First up is the delightfully named Crash & Burn in Stockholm, on the 2nd of March. Then later in May I’ll be at Poznan in Poland for GeeCon 2012. This talk focuses on [...]

On my current client project, in terms of managing configuration of the various environments, I have separated things into two problem spaces – provisioning hosts, and configuring hosts. Part of the reason for this separation is that although targeting AWS, we do need to allow us to support alternative services in the future, but I [...]

I’ll be speaking on the cloud track at JAX London 2011. The talk “Private Cloud, A Convenient Fiction” attempts to puncture some of the FUD on the subject. The nuances between various hosting solutions are many and varied, and don’t suit being put into neat boxes like ‘public’ and ‘private’. When I talk to clients [...]

It seems I spoke too soon. Just one day after thinking I had tracked down the source of the trouble, and yesterday evening brought another outage. The graph in CloudWatch was all too familiar, showing the huge uptick in CPU use. The box was again unresponsive and had to be restarted. Checking cpu_log for a [...]

I’m in the process of migrating the many sites I manage from Slicehost over to EC2 (which is where this blog is currently running). I hit a snag in the last day or two – my Montastic alerts told me that the sites I had already migrated were not responding. I tried – and failed [...]