Other Posts Part I Part II Simple Filters In this section we introduce the most-frequently used feature of jq: the filter. Filters allow you to reduce a given stream of JSON to another smaller, more refined stream of JSON that you can then do more filtering or processing on on if you want ..read more

As Cloud Native consultants, we often get asked about managing cloud costs. The business that doesn’t ever want to save money is a rare one indeed. However, what we have found is that in the Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) age times of plenty businesses were more focussed on delivery and less on profit than they normally would be. Now that interest rates have returned to normal, investors are asking questions about whether their money might return more in a bank than being spent on rented IT infrastructure. A recent estimate of cloud spend in tech-related industries claimed that 3 ..read more

At EngineerBetter we’ve evaluated four self-hosted CI systems in order to compare them against each other: Jenkins, Concourse, Tekton and Argo Workflows. For each CI system we’ve created some pipelines that ..read more

Version 7 of Cloud Foundry’s cf CLI is now generally available. This makes rolling deployments a first-class feature, and adds many more flexible workflows than the original cf push offered. These changes bring the Cloud Foundry user experience more in line with what users have come to expected from Kubernetes’ Deployments. Rolling deployments are now available - so why should you switch? A History of cf push Over the last 18 months, the Cloud Controller (the brains of Cloud Foundry) has been extended to support a new set of APIs - collectively known as V3 ..read more

At EngineerBetter, we’re going through the formality of ensuring that we’ve got the Certified Kubernetes Administrator qualification box ticked. Kelsey Hightower’s Kubernetes The Hard Way is a valuable guide to setting up a Kubes cluster ‘by hand’, and so I set about running through it ..read more

You can use your Yubikey to remember and type an arbitrary string, as well as using it as a OTP generator and a secure store for your SSH key. We use this so that we don’t have to remember our 1Password secret keys ..read more

Concourse runs all pipeline processes inside containers providing isolation, security and customisability. By default each Concourse worker allows only 250 containers to run concurrently, leading to the dreaded max containers reached error message. Thankfully this limit can be increased with two simple flags. How can you do this, should you do this, and why was the limit 250 ..read more

The way most enterprises operate is wasting both the time and money that they are made from. By learning from cognitive psychology and neuroscience we can find better, more productive ways of working ..read more

This post is the first in a series on Product Thinking ..read more

Introduction See Part I to get an introduction to this series, and a guide on the Hard Way method. In this post, we cover: What jq is Look at examples of it Introduce key terms Briefly look at its place in the software landscape jq This section introduces you to the jq command, starting with the simplest possible commands as well as a brief look at the most commonly-used flags. What is jq? jq is a program for parsing, querying, and manipulating JSON. More broadly, it’s a filter: it takes input and transforms it to output. It can help you programmatically answer questions ..read more