What is the future of the Solution Architect role?

As the delivery cycle quickens, what does the future hold for our box and line drawing skills as Solution Architects?

Why Agile isn't working

We keep hearing that Agile methodologies work… but, what if they’re not? Sometimes you need to look under the hood.

Introduction to R

Exploring EC2 pricing data using R

Sometimes using Excel to look at data works really well. Other times, such as when you are trying to make sense of a 170MB file of AWS EC2 pricing data it just sucks. Luckily R exists and can do the job really well! In this post I’ll run through some of the features of R and produce a nicely formatted CSV of on-demand EC2 pricing data.

Replacing Packer With KitchenCI and a Rakefile

An introduction to creating validated AMIs without using Packer.

Don't get me wrong, I love the HashiCorp products. I've been a Vagrant user since way back in my BC (Before Cloud) days and have continued a strong run of success backing the HashiCorp team. But the biggest issue I have is ensuring that the images created through Packer are worthy of being promoted along a delivery pipeline.

This post is about using KitchenCI, InSpec and a small Rakefile to create an enhanced AWS Machine Image (AMI) creation and validation workflow.