All of the posts on orchestration on here have been about Puppet on CentOS however last week I had need to script an AWS architecture and then launch instances built with Packer↗ into it. After much swearing I managed to hack together a python script which used Boto↗ to create a launch configuration and register it with an auto-scaling group, I then used a second script which re-cycled instances behind the Elastic Load Balancer which were launched with the previous launch configuration....

At the end of my last post about Grunt I mentioned that I will be adding code to concatenate the javascript, compress the images and also tidy the code up abit. I have now done this …. Javascript I moved all of the javascript to a folder called _js and then set up the following …. More Grunt & Jekyll 1/7 js: { src: [ ‘_js/jquery.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.plugin.min.js’, ‘js/bootstrap.min.js’, ‘_js/jquery.flexslider-min.js’, ‘_js/smooth-scroll.min.js’,’ _js/skrollr....

It’s that time of year again, here’s my top 10 albums of 2014…. The War On Drugs — Lost in the Dream↗ The Smashing Pumpkins — Monuments to an Elegy↗ Neil Finn — Dizzy Heights↗ Mogwai — Rave Tapes↗ Amplifier — Mystoria↗ Devin Townsend — Z2↗ The Pixies — Indie Cindy↗ Pink Floyd — The Endless River↗ St. Paul & The Broken Bones — Half the City↗ Mastodon — Once More ‘Round The Sun↗ I know number 2 has only just come out, but, they have been releasing tracks for the last month so I am putting it in....

As you may have noticed, the website looks different to how it was previously. I decided it was time for a refresh and I wanted to make the design a little more interesting. While Jekyll↗ & Github↗ pages use SASS↗ the Bootstrap theme I settled for uses LESS↗ . This meant that I needed to compile all of my CSS outside of Jekyll. Most of the articles I found say use either Gulp↗ or Grunt↗ , looking at the syntax of the two I preferred Grunt as it didn’t look like code....

Yesterday, I had day out of the office with Danny↗ at the 2014 London PuppetCamp↗ . It was the first time I had attended a PuppetLabs event, though I have streamed plenty of video from past camps and conferences. It was interesting to see how best practices had moved on (answer, lots) since I first had my Puppet epiphany over a year ago. For me, and in no order, the most interesting talks were …....

As mentioned in a previous post I tend to send most articles I am interested in reading to Pocket↗ so I can read them when I have time. Here is a selection of the most interesting “stuff” I have bookmarked over the last month or so …. How I Reverse Engineered Google DocsTo Play Back Any Document’s Keystrokes↗ A Flock of Tasty Sources on How to Start Learning High Scalability↗ AWS Best Practices — Enterprise Perspective↗ A Rare Peek Into The Massive Scale of AWS↗ Distributed systems for fun and profit↗ Post Mortem: The One Where We Accidentally DDOSed Ourselves↗ Docker in Production — What We’ve Learned Launching Over 300 Million Containers↗ SimCity That I Used to Know↗

I have been listening to the following albums on the headphones over the course of the last few weeks and here is a playlist of the select tracks which are available on Spotify …

Now the dev team at work↗ have moved over to using Docker we decided to have some fun. An internal system we use is based on Drupal7↗ , the development version of the site has a NGINX / PHP 5.4 container↗ running in front of it. We have been hearing alot about HHVM↗ so why not try building a container and seeing if it our codebase works? First off, as I prefer to use CentOS, I needed to find a way of getting HHVM installed which wouldn’t take hours (a build from source can notoriously take hours) as I was on the clock....