When we first implemented Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) one of our key requirements was centralized logging. As we expand the number of services we run in our production and sandbox environments, it has become increasingly important to understand what’s happening with each service and the interactions between services. We also use a service, called Wombat, to collect events from our front end React applications. Wombat collects events which we use for monitoring, diagnostics, metrics, and which we also want to correlate with our backend services.

Back story… tl;dr - some monitoring back story and not being dogmatic about your beliefs. UPDATE: I am writing a book about Prometheus take a look. As many folks know, I am one of the maintainers of Riemann, an event stream processor focussed on monitoring distributed systems. I wrote a book about monitoring in which I used Riemann as a centerpiece to explore new monitoring patterns and approaches. In the book, I describe an architecture of whitebox monitoring (with some selective blackbox monitoring) using a push-based model.

Announcing The Packer Book I’m announcing my new book: The Packer Book. I’ve been using Packer for a couple of years now. It’s the best image builder currently available and dovetails neatly with configuration management tools and other Hashicorp tools like Terraform. The book is a hands-on crash course. We cover installing Packer, building images, provisioning, Docker, writing infrastructure tests, and building more complex multi-platform build pipelines. We also delve into extending Packer with plug-ins and writing your own plug-ins.

Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. tl;dr - I’ve joined a new not-for-profit educational technology startup called Empatico as CTO. I’m looking for folks to work with me. For the last few years I’ve been talking about my struggles with how the tech industry builds product: both what’s being built, and how it’s being done.

The Terraform Book open for pre-orders The Terraform Book is nearly done (just a few copy edits and tech reviews to complete) and I hope to have it released in the next few weeks. As such I am opening up pre-orders today! You can pre-order from this site: https://terraformbook.com/ This way you can order now and as soon as the book is released you’ll receive a copy immediately! Amazon, Google Play and Nook will be available when the book is released.