TLDR: Buy it! Introduction It feels very odd sitting down to write this book review, something I think I last did in any depth when I was back at school! So what about this book made me want to write a review, well read on and I hope to explain… About Me First…

Google recently announced a new Database Engineer Exam, available to those who don’t think 60 questions in 2 hours is hardcore enough but instead want to do 120 questions in 4 hours. Being one who is trying to “catch them all”, I decided I was hardcore enough (or a glutton…

Introduction As I have said previously I love the tooling on offer in the cloud, especially around monitoring. I am also a big fan of the Google Workspace (formerly Gsuite) group of applications and have used Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calc, and Slides personally for a long while (including when I was…

Introduction One of my favourite things in the cloud is the tooling that makes observing our services and systems so much more straightforward. As a former ops guy, I have spent many hours staring at dashboards, scouring through logs, and fighting with tooling such as SCOM, Nagios (including the…

So the story begins at the tail end of July 2019 when I started a new adventure in my career by joining CTS (something I wholeheartedly recommend!). My background was quite varied having supported a variety of different technologies, originally enterprise storage arrays before moving into sysadmin roles specialising in…

Firstly I want to shout out to Doug Mahugh and his article which inspired this one. All I have done is implement his solution in Powershell so I can include it as part of a startup script for immutable VMs. I won’t cover too much of what Doug covered but…

Introduction Whilst I am a huge fan of short lived, immutable VMs with system state turned over to managed services like Cloud SQL, sometimes this simply isn’t practical or possible. In these situations we are often left with long running, stateful instances that require the same sort of maintenance as ‘traditional’…

When recently working on a customer environment I was looking at ways to improve the startup time of their Windows Application servers. Their sophisticated Powershell startup script was taking about 15–20 minutes to execute fully and involved installing IIS, Azure DevOps & Stackdriver agents and the specialist application software. It…