Is this thing still on?

W.T.F

Holy hell, I remembered I had this thing.  I literally hadn’t posted here for over half a decade. Too busy with work, my better half and Skyrim / Eve Online / Witcher. etc etc.

To be honest I am certain as death and taxes that long form blogging is fairly dead, so I’ve not missed it.  “Social media” has changed a ton since 2011 and who can be arsed with serious discursive blog posts when you can simply quickie-shitpost on Twitter and Reddit instead?

Instant messaging? Oh that’s gone, I even switched off my Jabber service ages back, uninstalled Pidgin because honestly I can be contacted by anyone I care about via Facebook/Slack/Steam/LinkedIn – I don’t need / want MSN/ICQ/AIM/Jabber and friends anymore, too much redundant, obsolete clutter

So yeah don’t expect lengthy updates or diatribes here often. Most don’t care – they’re here for the occasional techie post / howto.

Which reminds me: I’m devops these days. I’m done with traditional systems admin and it’s going the way of “operator” accounts and COBOL outside of banks. I’m getting too old for that shit and I sleep through those dead-of-night phone calls

If someone wants me to get up at some ungodly hour to hand-fix some broken infrastructure I’ve got some bad news for them:

You’re doing it wrong.  Infrastructure as code is the way to go, and track that with revision control. Most of your breakage is because someone is cowboying it, poorly.

This site’s just been migrated off an ancient CentOS 5  Rackspace VM (originally a 512mb Slicehost box)  to AWS EC2 using purely CloudFormation and Ansible roles/plays. I can (and have) recreated the whole shebang with a couple of commands. The only tinkering is around the security groups/network ACLs around IPv6 (since backported into code)

Hell even the database migrations were done in Ansible (yeah yeah I know about AWS DMS too, shaddap)

It’s the best thing I’ve done for my personal infrastructure in ages because I actually know how it’s configured , can rebuild/migrate as I need to and still have time to do other things rather than slave away in vim in an SSH session  ?

…and it runs reliably (touch wood.)