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 …

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. 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 …

If you’ve ever created a private hosted zone in Route 53, you may have noticed it always assigns the same name servers: 1 ns-1536.awsdns-00.co.uk. 2 ns-0.awsdns-00.com. 3 ns-1024.awsdns-00.org. 4 ns-512.awsdns-00.net. The numbers don’t seem to be coincidental. 1536 is the RFC number for “Common DNS Implementation …

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