Seven Years at Okta, Briefly
After a little over seven years, I left Okta last month. Here’s a quick look back. I joined in July 2018 to run the EMEA Technical Operations SRE team. For most of that time my teams were keeping …
PercussiveRepair.net
Building a Platform We Weren't Allowed to Run
Over the last few years a good chunk of my time at Okta has gone on compliance: PCI, GDPR and HIPAA, and then the US government programmes, FedRAMP Moderate, FedRAMP High and DoD IL4. The lower levels …
Wearing Two Hats: SRE and Product
In mid 2020 I became a Product Owner at Okta, and earlier this year a Product Architect. I’ve been doing both while still managing SRE teams, so I decide what we should build and then my teams run it …
Recording for Posterity
This is a simple mantra I’ve used in many teams I worked in or led over the years: Prefer Services to Software Make services that are robust and functional. Buy services that other folk do better than …
AWS Account Creation Automation & Security
It’s been a busy couple of years so, as is usual, my blog was left to languish. That doesn’t mean I’ve not done interesting and challenging things in the interim. Things worth blogging about. So here …
Traildash on ECS
I’ve recently had some issues where I’ve had to investigate the AWS API usage on one of our accounts. Enabling Cloudtrail is a start but all it does is shove a load of gzipped json files into an S3 …
How to be a Good Tech Lead
Transitioning from engineering to management/leadership is tough unless you understand the sacrifices you have to make. Rarely can you keep your hands in the guts of the engineering you used to know …
The Operations Documentation Problem
Documentation tends to be a polarising, all or nothing, topic in the Operations teams I have been a part of. Everyone agrees on its fundamental importance but no one seems to like to spend time or …
Further Notes on SaltStack Monitoring
A few weeks ago I started looking at SaltStack, my current config management package choice, as the central component of an open source componentised monitoring package. This is now up and running in …
Elasticsearch on AWS or How I learned to stop worrying and love the lucene index
Ahh, Elasticsearch, the cause of, and solution to, all of lifes problems. I run a Logstash/Elasticsearch/Kibana cluster on EC2 as a application/system log aggregator for the web service I’m …
Saltstack Monitoring
I spoke recently at the Februrary London DevOps meetup about my adventures with solo DevOps and the SaltStack config management system ( Slides ) One of the other talks at the meetup, Stop Using …
CloudWatchr for AWS Instances
For some time I’ve been using Cloudwatch as a supplement to my other graphing and monitoring packages, but I finally got tired of the poor UI and lack of customisation. I had seen and tested some …