Blog

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, […]

The Automation Logic DevOps Academy is a 12-week intensive course taking the top percentile of STEM graduates and guiding them to become Junior DevOps Consultants when they graduate the course.  They learn a whole range of tools and skills to prepare them and finish the course by splitting into project teams to complete final projects […]

Procuring Cloud Solutions in the Public Sector In 2019 the NHS Shared Business Services Cloud Solutions Framework was officially launched. You might ask, why another framework? Put simply it’s to provide the most straight-forward, OJEU compliant route for the NHS and the wider public sector to purchase cloud solutions.  Following a rigorous exercise to evaluate […]

There is a temptation, once operating under the DevOps model, to rest on your laurels, content that you are now working in a modern development environment. The upshot is many organisations don’t measure the outcomes brought about through DevOps. They’ve done the hard bit, undergoing the initial technology, people, and process changes that the model […]

Our latest DevOps Academy intake have now been here for about 6 weeks and are in the process of becoming experts in AWS, CI/CD and all things Cloud and DevOps over a 12-week intensive course. They’ll also be having a number of sessions on Agile and Scrum.  Recently I presented to them about ITIL and […]

Engineers at Automation Logic (AL) are fortunate to be involved with a multitude of projects within various client sites, some of which are within the public sector. These projects make extensive use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), whether to meet application or networking infrastructure requirements. Thus, events held by those at AWS are a great […]

Why transferring knowledge is easy, but transferring insight is hard. Acquiring Insight. Story Time: One way that AL engineers demonstrate the insight we’ve gained through experience is when we realise that an old technical solution might work in a new context. As an 18 year old nerd from Bolton, in 1998 I got my first […]

Terraform, and infrastructure-as-code, in general, are an essential tool in the DevOps arsenal.  They can provide the means to create a stable pipeline of environments through which developers can safely test their applications, and – if handled correctly – offer the potential of fast, one-click deployments of full environments with minimal effort.  To get to […]

IAM a Mess Often times when looking through CloudFormation example templates online, we will tend to notice that IAM roles and policies are coded alongside the resource they are attached to, embedded into the same template. In most circumstances, that is perfectly fine – having IAM resources in the same CloudFormation template as your resources […]