In 2013 I was a systems engineer, I worked mostly on automation scripting for consistently delivering virtualized infrastructure on VMware. A job I’d enjoyed but was ready to move my career forwards, my at the time colleague Richard Dowling and I started looked into pursuing advanced VMware certification. In …

Having passed the VCAP5-DCD exam with little to no studying only eighteen months ago and VCIX6-NV since. All things considered I was pretty confident of doing well in the VCAP6-DCV Design exam, and when I completed exam I was pretty sure I’d passed. To my surprise I failed the exam with a 285, to make matters …

Encryption of data at rest is a requirement for many customers, with VMware hosted Virtual Machines (VMs) there are two ways to achieve this. VM data can be encrypted using vSAN whole-datastore encryption or using Storage Policy (VMcrypt). Both VM Encryption and vSAN Encryption require a Key Management Interoperability …

The NSX-V Plug-in for vRealize Orchestrator offers some great functionally, however creating custom workflows caused me some headaches. When building some custom workflows using the vRO API explorer there are inconsistencies, I’ve learned to not rely on the vRO API explorer for NSX plug-in documentation and …

My former colleagues had made me aware of pyVmomi an open source library which VMware provide and mostly maintain for managing vSphere, so its here I shall start. Since then NSX for vSphere has also an open source library NSX RAML Client provided by VMware so I’ll then move to that. I am performing this learning …

The goal of this post is to walk through the creation of a AWS test environment which I use to explore the Python SDK interactions with DyanmoDB. For learning I use the free tier and so used to create the environment as needed manually. After doing this once I decided to encapsulate the configuration in a Cloud …

My goal here is to setup a simple RESTful API which accepts GET and POST methods to trigger a Lambda Function to read and put information into DynamoDB. First we’ll create a test DynamoDB table and put some items into it, aws dynamodb create-table --table-name 'MyTable' --attribute-definitions …

One common critisism of Agile teams is they are architecturally weak and disconnected from the operational realities of complex enterprise environments. Traditional enterprise architecture processes are viewed focusing on delivering documentation rather than delivering a working solution, slow, and focussed on …

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a collection of capabilities that helps you automate management tasks such as collecting system inventory, applying operating system (OS) patches, automating the creation of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), and configuring operating systems (OSs) and applications at scale. Amazon EC2 Systems …

AWS dynamoDB is a really useful key-value store which is really easy to consume from scripts. However while the AWS Powershell module contains functions for ‘Managing Tables’ it does not contain functions for ‘Reading Data’ or ‘Modifying Data’. I had found Julian Biddle had written a …