When I was co-located in office with the other members of my team I never really had to put much thought into the structure of the working day. I turned up around 9am, took 30m lunch at 12noon and left around 5:00pm. My work is delivering solutions which often span several weeks or months as such I have a great deal of …

When developing a cloud native application using Docker containers she soon needs to understand how Docker containers communicate. In previous post I looked at how Docker containers communicate on a single host. When the developer wants to scaleout capacity of the hosting across multiple hosts or increase abailability …

I have under taken my personal challenges over the years and the occasion of a new decade seemed a good reason to undertake another. I was inspired to look at doing this by my daughter who is an avid fan of science and is very data-driven. Last year in the middle of summer at the Bluedot science and music festival we …

When developing a cloud native application using Docker containers understanding network connectivity between containers and non-Docker workloads such as other servers and cloud APIs is essential. Docker’s networking subsystem is pluggable using drivers, several drivers exist by default, and others can be added easily. …

vRealize Automation Cloud and 8.x allows you to deploy and configure cloud agnostic virtual machines. To achieve agnostic in-guest OS customization capability across for on-premises vSphere, AWS, GCP and Azure endpoints cloud-init is used for Linux guests and cloudbase-init is used for Windows guests. Inital Attempt …

I recently began looking more closely at cloud-init for customizing VMware guest VMs. This caused me some heachaches! I took various notes while troubleshooting and researching around this. Why Guest OS Customization Is Needed When you clone a virtual machine or deploy a virtual machine from a template it clones the …

VMware Cloud Automation Services is a product suite comprising three products, Cloud Assembly, Service Broker and Code Stream. Cloud Assembly provides a blueprinting engine and manages connectivity to multiple cloud endpoints. Service Broker provides a unified catalog for publishing blueprints with role-based policies. …

Moving towards application centric infrastructure suitable for microservices applications requires a good example application to work with. I saw an NSX demo presented by Yves Fauser where he used just such an application called planespotter. My first task towards understanding this more was to get this setup in my …

Hashicorp Terraform is a tool which enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure by defining its configuration as code. VMware NSX-T is a product which enables software defined network infrastructure. The Terraform NSX-T provider allows us to deliver and maintain NSX-T configuration …

While looking at the various documentation sets I found it difficult to understand the NSX-T and OpenShift integration. A lot was masked by configuration performed by Ansible scripts. Here I try and record my understanding of the technology and then work through getting this running in a capacity constrained lab …