Proactive Ops

You use a JetBrains IDE?

The title of today’s post is how AWS has left me feeling over the last few months.

Triaging support tickets is very error prone work.

I love sharing my thoughts here, but sometimes someone else says it better.

This week’s post is an excuse to write a note for my future self.

In my recent AWS RDS Data API deep dive post, I looked at different ways the API could be called.

In a recent post I explained why the AWS RDS Data API makes bastion servers redundant.

Bastion servers have been a staple of cloud environments.

LLMs are only as good as their training data.

Some days are rough for customer support agents.

AWS offers 3 ways of controlling network egress - Network ACLs, Security Groups and the Network Firewall.

My favourite AWS PreInvent 2024 announcement was JSONata support in Step Functions.

Building integrations and workflows is often a repetitve and error prone task.

Managing infrastructure using code is accepted best practice in the cloud.

Have you heard about Proactive Ops, but don’t know where to start?

Several times I’ve presented a talk entitled Proactive Ops: Event Driven IT Operations.

Proactive Ops is all about using events to identify issues and prevent incidents.

Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind. ― Douglass Macarthur There is merit in Macarthur’s often butchered quote about rules.

For many years I used Makefiles as an abstraction layer in my CI/CD tooling. make allows the same sequence of actions to be run both by the CI pipeline and developers locally.

This week I’m going to keep things short.

One of the key activities in Proactive Ops is analysing events to identify potential issues and remediating them without human intervention.

Traditional thinking in application development is there should always be at least 3 environments - dev, stage and prod(uction).

experiment (noun): an operation or procedure carried out under controlled conditions in order to discover an unknown effect or law, to test or establish a hypothesis, or to illustrate a known law Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/experime…

Many teams aspire to building out a collection of loosely coupled domain driven microservices.

Pipes are a key component of Unix.

This post is the first in a series that will explore the technical foundations of an automation platform that supports Proactive Ops.

At its core, traditional IT Operations is overwhelmingly reactive - humans respond to incidents and tickets.