Recreating the noisome darkness of Cave

I first encountered Cave at the age of 9 or 10, when visiting my brother’s school as part of their yearly Open Days. The computer lab was proudly running an array of BBC Micro computers, linked together on an Econet network. I was already heavily into computers (and games!) at this point, but this was the first time I saw a MUD in action. Cave was released back in 1985 by XOB Software.

March 6, 2021 Read
AWS and OPNsense: Site-to-site IPsec VPN setup

There will always be circumstances where you will want to run a site-to-site VPN setup with AWS. You may have private resources (not Internet facing) within AWS that you need to access in a secure manner from an on-prem or home network. In this example, I walk through setting up an IPsec site-to-site VPN where the two sides are as follows: AWS – A private VPC, containing one EC2 server (to allow me to test everything is working!

May 23, 2020 Read
Benchmarking the new Arm-powered M6g instances from AWS

Note: Although I work for AWS, these are my own personal findings and thoughts. Please do not consider them as official benchmarks in any way! AWS announced the latest M6g instances in December 2019. These feature Arm-powered Graviton2 processors, as well as fully encrypted DDR4 memory. Arm processors are everywhere in terms of mobile devices, and my favourite Raspberry Pi computers, but have not traditionally been featured within the cloud.

May 13, 2020 Read
Home Firewall: PC Engines APU2 E2 pfSense and OPNsense build, courtesy of LinITX

I’ve recently been doing some more tinkering with the excellent Raspberry Pi devices, including setting up a home Pi-hole to assist with sending web adverts into a black hole. This got me thinking about implementing a decent home network firewall solution, above and beyond the default one you get when running your average broadband router. Security aside, I’m also a big fan of stats and pretty graphs, and these are quite simply hard to come by with some of the basic consumer broadband router solutions.

May 10, 2020 Read
Enabling PPPoE with Plusnet – with a modem from 2011

I’ve been looking to implement a more sophisticated firewall solution at home for a while now. The likes of pfSense and OPNsense can happily authenticate with PPPoE via a suitable broadband modem, which takes care of your WAN interface cleanly. If your modem can’t do this, then essentially you have to do it via IP bridging instead, and end up with a horrible ‘double NAT’ situation. I really wanted to avoid that.

May 8, 2020 Read
AWS Savings Plans: Thoughts from the Enterprise

AWS Savings Plans were launched just over a month ago now. They are essentially being pitched as “Reservations, but easier”. In both cases, pre-pay for your compute capacity and unlock discounts for doing so. Here, I present my thoughts on this, coming from an Enterprise AWS background. What Enterprise background is that exactly? I work for StepStone. AWS is our cloud provider of choice. We have approaching 100 accounts and an expenditure level within AWS that you would expect given our €3,000+ million revenues (2018).

December 12, 2019 Read
re:Invent 2019: From CAPCOM to Deliveroo – My pick of the sessions

I had the opportunity to attend re:Invent for the second year running, courtesy of my employer StepStone. I work for them as their Group AWS Programme Manager, which can be succinctly described as making sure we Do AWS Right! For a bit more information on that you could look at my LinkedIn profile, or check out my previous post titled “How StepStone achieved a Cloud Center of Excellence”. re:Invent is a complete whirlwind due to there being so many options for things to do over the week.

December 9, 2019 Read
AWS Summit: How StepStone achieved a Cloud Centre of Excellence

I was recently invited by CloudHealth to present at the AWS Summit London. This was a dive into the lessons learned at StepStone in implementing a Cloud Centre of Excellence – coming from having nothing in AWS to it now being a key corporate strategy. I feel that we are now in a Very Good Place [TM] in terms of our use of AWS, but there were certainly hiccups along the way, which is what this deck concentrates on.

May 20, 2019 Read
From ‘Chaos Engineering’ to ‘The Future of Mixed-Autonomy Traffic’: Sessions I enjoyed from re:Invent 2018

I got the chance to take in a good selection of sessions at Amazon’s recent re:Invent conference. Here are the ones that I particularly enjoyed and recommend! CON310: Chaos Engineering for Modern Applications on AWS A bit of history on Chaos Engineering (made famous by Netflix in many ways), followed by a demonstration of a product from Gremlin which is designed to help in this area. Top tip: “If you’re building a new application, build chaos into it from the beginning”.

December 12, 2018 Read