The IT Hollow

In a previous post, we looked at how to use change sets with CloudFormation.

If you’ve done any work in Amazon Web Services you probably know the importance of CloudFormation (CFn) as part of your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy.

If you’ve been in technology for a while, you’ve probably had to go through a hardware refresh cycle at some point.

Over recent years, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become sort of a utopian goal of many organizations looking to modernize their infrastructure.

It’s the beginning of a whole new year.

With all of the services that Amazon has to offer, it can sometimes be difficult to manage your cloud environment.

Today at AWS re:INVENT, Amazon had several new product announcements which is not uncommon for the company but one in-particular raised several eyebrows.

If you’re an Amazon Web Services customer and you’re not using the built in AWS config rules, you should be.

Sometimes it’s just not desirable to have your Amazon EC2 instances deployed all willy-nilly across the AWS infrastructure.

Amazon Web Services has some great tools to help you operate your EC2 instances with their Simple Systems Manager services.

VMware has been busy over the last year trying to re-invent themselves with more focus on cloud.

Sometimes, you just need to change the data center where you’re running your virtual machines.

When it comes to deploying EC2 instances within Amazon Web Services VPCs, you may find yourself confused when presented with those tenancy options.

Geeks and sports just don’t mix.

Please use this post as a landing page to get you started with using the EC2 Simple Systems Manager services from Amazon Web Services.

Sometimes you need to ensure that things are always a certain way when you deploy AWS EC2 instances.

Amazon Web Services uses Systems Manager Documents to define actions that should be taken on your instances.

Generally speaking, when you deploy infrastructure through code, or run deployment scripts you’ll need to have a certain amount of configuration data.

We focus a lot of time talking about public cloud and provisioning.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend Cloud Field Day 2, out in Silicon Valley.

It is a pretty fair assumption that the Netapp company that you’re currently familiar with will be a much different company within the next five years.

In today’s world, if you can get an Internet connection, you can go anywhere and connect to any service that is publicly available.

Startup Funding - An Example with Rubrik Is Rubrik Really a Cloud Solution???

HPE recently announced that they were getting deeper into the cloud game bin introducing their Nimble Cloud Volumes (NCV) solution.

Once a year the Discovery channel has a Shark-a-palooza around all things sharks.

I had high expectations for the sessions being presented during Cloud Field Day 2 hosted by GestaltIT in Silicon Valley during the week of June 26th-28th.

Tech Field Day will be presenting Cloud Field Day 2 on July 26th through the 28th in Silicon Valley.

Deploying security patches to servers is almost as much fun as managing backup jobs.

In a previous post we covered the different capabilities and basic setup of EC2 Systems Manager, including the IAM roles that needed to be created and the installation of the SSM Agent.

We love Amazon EC2 instances because of how easy they are to deploy and we have a huge catalog of templates (AMIs) to choose from which really speeds up our provisioning.

AWS is taking the virtualization world by storm.

Blogging has been a labor of love for me for a little over five years now.

Amazon’s S3 is a cost effective way to store file but many organizations are used to mapping NFS shares to machines for file storage purposes.

Preventing blueprint sprawl should be a consideration if you’re building out a new cloud through vRealize Automation.

vRealize Automation version 7.3 dropped a few weeks ago and you’re really excited about the new improvements that have been made with the platform.

vRA is great at deploying servers in an automated fashion, but to really use the built in functionality for an organization some additional information should be requested to properly place the workloads in the environment.

It’s a pretty common design request these days to have a single authentication source.

Version 7.2 of vRealize Automation introduced containers to the vRA solution.

To me, a home lab is an important piece of my ongoing education.

Rubrik has announced their latest revision of their Cloud Data Management solution, version 3.2.

vRealize Code Stream is a tool that is used to operationalize infrastructure code blueprints for release management.

vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (code named Houdini by VMware) allows us to treat our vRealize Automation Blueprints, or other objects, as pieces of code that can be promoted between environments.

In previous posts we covered how to install, configure and setup vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (code named Houdini) so that we could get to this point.

In the previous post we covered the architecture and setup of the vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps (also known as Houdini).

Deploying blueprints in vRealize Automation is one thing, but with all things as code, we need to be able to move this work from our test instances to development and production instances.

As of vRealize Automation 7.2, you can now deploy workloads to Microsoft Azure through vRA’s native capabilities.

Recently, I’ve been going through and updating my lab so that I’m all up to date with the latest technology.

Packer is a free tool from Hashicorp that allows you to build new images.

Many cloud initiatives require having a portal for users to choose which workloads can be deployed.

It’s the moment you’ve all (really a few of you) been waiting for!