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I am pleased to able to say that I have contributed a chapter to the final book in the current The New Stack↗ ebook series on Docker & Containers. The ebook, which is free, is called “Monitoring & Management With Docker & Containers” Container and service-oriented architectures present a complex challenge for monitoring and performance management. Service-driven systems have dramatically increased the number of components monitoring tools interface with. Read how developers and vendors are tackling performance and monitoring in operational and production environments, and what obstacles are unique to managing containerized systems....

So here they are, my top ten albums of 2016. Like last year they are all ones I physically own rather than stream or have brought digitally … The full list is below (I know there are 30) … David Bowie — Blackstar Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool Knifeworld — Bottled Out Of Eden British Theatre — Mastery Charles Bradley — Changes Kate Bush — Before The Dawn The Anchoress — Confessions Of A Romance Novelist Matt Berry — The Small Hours The Sea Nymphs — On The Dry Land Crippled Black Phoenix — Bronze S U R V I V E — RR7349 Iamthemorning — Lighthouse Three Trapped Tigers — Silent Earthling Gong — Rejoice!...

I am not sure if this a bug or not, but I spent an hour scratching my head today trying to figure out why part of playbook which was working seemingly suddenly stopped. I have a playbook which executes each morning to create a staging version of a site from the previous night’s snapshots. Each weekday morning at 0730am it … Bootstraps an AWS environment (VPC, ELB and all the other acronyms) Launches a RDS instance from the previous nights snapshot Launches an instances and deploys an application and then creates an AMI Creates an auto-scaling group and launches three instances using the new AMI behind an ELB The base operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 which does not ship with any AWS tools installed by default, so before the tasks which start interacting with the instance and application I run the following;...

Note This book was scrapped just before it was due to be published due to the Flocker project loosing its funding and folding. I am pleased to say that my third book is now available to pre-order from Packt↗ , Amazon UK↗ & Amazon US↗ . The book is released in the new year. However, if you purchase from Packt, you will get early access↗ to the ebook.

I have been writing a lot again this month so not a lot to post, however, I have been listening to a lot of music … You can listen to it all here …

The two books I wrote about Docker are available for 50% off today from the Packt web site, click here to goto the deal↗ .

More and more I am having to not only think about how I would ensure that the infrastructure a service I am deploying on is highly available but also how I can manage its entire life-cycle in code. I have tried several tools for this such as Terraform↗ , Puppet and Ansible, however over the last six months or so I have settled on Ansible. After I first looked at it back in December 2014↗ it has come on quite a lot, especially after the version 2 release at the start of this year↗ ....

Its been a while since I have posted a playlist, so I thought I would do one of all of the coloured vinyl I have been playing over the last few months … Here are some pictures of them in their full glory …