Operational Excellence Means Automation

People use the term “operational excellence” in a lot of different ways. In its vaguest sense, it means continuous improvement as applied to operations. But you’re interested in what it means in the context of technology operations. And I’m here to tell you that it means automation. Operational Excellence is one of the five pillars of the AWS Well-architected Framework. The AWS whitepaper lists six design principles for achieving operational excellence.

Why I Don’t Teach The OSI Model

I recently got an email from a viewer of my Practical Networking course who asked how the TCP/IP networking terms I used mapped to the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) model. First, a bit of background. The OSI model is a generic networking model that is supposed to describe conceptually how networks carry data. Within the last four decades or so, 99.9% of all computer networking curricula for beginners has started by rehashing the OSI model.

Using AWS Systems Manager to Upgrade WordPress

After years of manually upgrading my self-hosted WordPress installation, I decided it was finally time to apply some devops principles (namely automation) to this process. This site runs on an EC2 instance on AWS, so I decided to use AWS Systems Manager (aka SSM). I started out by creating the following Command Document (which happens to be in YAML format because JSON is ugly): --- schemaVersion: "2.2" description: "Download and install WordPress"

Architecting for Security on AWS

My latest course “Architecting for Security on AWS” is now available on Pluralsight! You’ll learn how to secure your data and AWS services using a defense-in-depth approach, including: Protecting your AWS credentials using identity and access management Capturing and analyze logs using CloudTrail, CloudWatch, and Athena Implementing network and instance security Encrypting data at rest and in-transit Setting up data backup, replication, and recovery Go check it out!