Announcing The Terraform Book I’d like to announce my next book: The Terraform Book. I’ve been excited about Terraform for a while now. Like many emerging technologies the materials, beyond the documentation, are a mish-mash of dated blog posts and Gists. To help folks getting started with Terraform I decided to write an introductory book. The book is a hands-on crash course. We cover installing Terraform and building simple infrastructure. We build upon this with more complex features and advanced examples including:

The Docker Book version 1.12.2 I am pleased to announce version 1.12.2 of The Docker Book is out! It is a total rewrite of most of the book for the Docker 1.12.1 release. Every example, command and command output has been updated. Many of the chapters have been heavily modified to reflect current best practices. It also contains the errata and fixes you awesome folks keep sending in. How do I get the update?

I am pleased to announce that The Art of Monitoring has been released! It’s a hands-on and introductory guide to the art of modern application and infrastructure monitoring and metrics. We start small and then build on what you learn to scale out to multi-site, multi-tier applications. The book is written for both developers and sysadmins. We focus on building monitored and measurable applications. We also use tools that are designed to handle the challenges of managing Cloud, containerised and distributed applications and infrastructure.

This is another post triggered by writing The Art of Monitoring. You can join the mailing list on that site for further information and updates. Last week my phone danced its way across the floor after a flurry of notifications from our site. An upstream issue had caused a burst of false alarms to trigger. This is annoying but not nearly as annoying as when you accidentally trigger those notifications yourself.

This is another post triggered by writing The Art of Monitoring. You can join the mailing list on that site for further information and updates. Most logging mechanisms emit log entries that contain a string value: the message or description of the error. The classic example of this is Syslog, used by many hosts, services and applications as a default logging format. A typical Syslog message looks like: 1 Dec 6 23:17:01 logstash CRON[5849]: (root) CMD (cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.