Testing Submodules' Commit Path within Jenkins Pipeline

5 min read - Mar 10, 2019

Submodules? I've never been a massive fan of submodules as they come with their own set of complexities and surprises, and embed dependency management within your SCM when really that should be the job of your packaging tool. But sometimes they are the right tool for the job when other tools are absent or your deploy is atypical. I've been using them recently to split out code that needed to be shared across repos but which wasn't available to be distributed via a package repository of any kind.

Automated Test Kitchen Checks on GitHub Pull Requests using Docker, TeamCity, and AWS Spot Instances

6 min read - Jul 2, 2018

Scenario Being a model Chef user you're using Test Kitchen to do integration testing of your Cookbooks. It works great on your machine using Vagrant! So let's make sure these tests always run before code gets merged into Master in the GitHub repo. Why Docker? We'll be using the chef/chefdk Docker container to run our Kitchen commands because what is the bane of a build agent's life? Build dependencies! And what's Docker good at?

Creating your own PowerShell Repository with Nexus 3

5 min read - Apr 9, 2017

Intro The introduction of PowerShell Gallery in PowerShell 5.0 is something that the Windows world has been craving for a long time (alongside Chocolatey, though I have somewhat mixed feelings about Chocolatey). The PowerShell equivilent to pip, gem, npm, it allows you to install community made PowerShell modules with a single command (Install-Module to be precise!). This is a great way to save yourself from spending hours re-inventing the wheel and easily consume code that someone else has slaved away to make work already.

Reporting on PagerDuty call outs with Splunk

4 min read - May 30, 2016

Pagerduty has a pretty kickass reporting feature, but my aim is to create a holistic dashboard for my team's operational work, and to do that I need to have all my data in one place. That one place? Splunk! I love Splunk, have done ever since seeing a presentation on it years ago, but for a long time it stayed out of reach for mere mortals due to its price point.

WinOps Conference London #2

7 min read - May 26, 2016

Intro I don't have slide decks for all of the talks (though I've added them where available), if you have one that I'm missing, please link to it in the comments! Jeffrey Snover - The DevOpsification of Windows Server After hearing and seeing Snover on so many podcasts, Virtual Academy videos, and conference recordings, it was great to finally see the inventor of PowerShell talk in person. Sporting Vibrams, Snover took the stage to run the audience through the historical ‘phases’ of Windows Server to frame what he sees as the next stage of evolution, Windows Server 2016.

Mondo, YNAB, and an Intro to Go

6 min read - May 15, 2016

Go I've been wanting to get into Go for a while. Despite the logo it's a very respectable open source project developed by a team at Google that “makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software”. Crucially, Go is a cross-platform, compiled language that's used notably by the HashiCorp suite of products. That means that if I want to contribute modules to say, Terraform (and I do) I need to know Go well enough to write decent, tested code that will get accepted in a pull request.

A Week with Terraform

7 min read - May 2, 2016

As I mentioned in a previous post, AWS Config is an excellent tool for ensuring compliance across your AWS accounts, but can be challenging to set up consistently across large numbers of regions and accounts. To ease this pain I attempted to set up AWS Config using CloudFormation but found this challenging when using custom rules due to the necessity of uploading the Lambda functions to an S3 bucket in each region first.

AWS Config Intro with CloudFormation

5 min read - Apr 24, 2016

AWS Config is a tool from Amazon designed to help you audit your AWS infrastructure for best practice and security adherence. It’s ideal for maintaining an overview across multiple accounts (especially Dev accounts) to ensure that people aren’t accidentally leaving 3389 or 22 open to the entire world, and similar security ‘faux pas’. Multiple account management for AWS is still quite a shaky experience. Managing users, billing, connectivity, etc. is a fractured and often confusing process, so anything that offers a helping hand for standardisation is extremely welcome.

Creating HTTP Invoked PowerShell Azure Functions

3 min read - Apr 16, 2016

Azure Functions (introduced on the 31st of March 2016) is Azure’s answer to AWS Lambda, but boasts a much wider range of supported languages, particularly PowerShell which piqued my interest. It’s currently in Preview, and the documentation is a little light at the time of writing. In fact, it’s basically non-existent for PowerShell save for a single QueueTrigger – PowerShell example function for PS scripts triggered by a queue. So let’s work from this as our base script!

Test Kitchen with a SQL Server Dependency

4 min read - Mar 4, 2016

I want to be able to test my cookbooks/scripts without having to rely on independent testing infrastructure! I want to be able to do kitchen converge and have all my infrastructure ready to go without any further thought to the dependencies! This is why I’m such a huge fan of Matt Wrock’s Kitchen-Nodes. It’s a provisioner wrapper around Chef-Zero for Test Kitchen, which allows you to access some of the attributes from other nodes which you’re provisioning in Test Kitchen using Chef Search.