Blog

2020, where do we even start?  It was a year that many may not want to dwell on, understandably. But for us it was a year that showed the strength and resilience of our team, so we’re looking back at the positives we discovered and the lessons we learnt.  Speaking to our Co-founder Kris Saxton […]

Last year AL had a pretty scary decision to make. Our DevOps Academy is one of the most successful aspects of the business, but we’d never tried to run one entirely remotely. The Academy is a 12-week intensive course for 6 STEM graduates to become junior DevOps Engineers. Usually, these graduates would spend 12 weeks […]

If you’re reading this then I guess you’re in the middle of refactoring your terraform code, trying to make it reusable, easier to maintain and actually be proud enough to share it with others! Writing reusable code in the form of modules can be a challenging task, so we will try to explain some basics […]

As a consulting engineer at AL, my bread and butter for the last three years has been the likes of Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins. These are all tools which are fairly simple in principle, but have plenty of quirks and unintended uses which can keep an engineer learning/engaged/frustrated for some time. For a couple of […]

As part of our 12-week DevOps Academy, our graduates are expected to group up in the last 2 weeks for their final projects. This is a large part of their mark and differs from their independent working as we assign them ‘a client’ to provide a real-life problem for them to look to solve. The […]

Before the events of COVID-19, we had planned to begin our 5th DevOps Graduate Academy. We’d begun hiring, following our usual process, with a group of potential candidates coming in for a group interview/team-building exercise, a test, and then breaking out into 121 interviews with members of our leadership team.  When the seriousness of the […]

We’ve always said we’re a technology company with a human touch, and right now is the perfect time to explain just how much technology can be used to help people.  Those companies who have utilised online collaboration tools effectively and taken the steps to allow remote working have a head start right now. But it […]

Over the years the agile movement has steadily gained pace alongside the DevOps evolution, thus changing how we deliver products and services. Gaining feedback from both systems and customers has allowed companies to understand their needs better: Learning what needs to change and, critically, what to change it to.   As with most ideas attributed to […]

TL;DR – No, Not Really No Job Too Small, We’ll Do It All There’s a joke about a young engineer at their very first job, in a milk bottling factory. The supervisor has a task for them, and explains: “You see this conveyor belt here? Every now and again it will jerk to a stop, […]

CloudFormation is the AWS native way of describing Infrastructure as Code, it is a simple and easy way to deploy almost all types of resources while AWS takes care of their lifecycle. For example, we can easily create, delete or update an EC2 instance by changing properties in a CloudFormation template. Unfortunately, in some circumstances, […]