Devops
Implementing technologies that optimise your infrastructure, empower your developers, and allow your business to cost-effectively scale.

Immerse Infrastructure

Deploying a Globally Distributed Application Platform with Docker

Immerse is a VR startup based in London, UK. Immerse provides an enterprise virtual reality CMS and Unity SDK . I joined the company in 2017 as a DevOps Engineer to lead the company’s effort in becoming a global VR platform. Notably, my efforts at Immerse include; building a deployment system which allows us to deploy, update, and scale global infrastructure within minutes modernising their infrastructure in AWS using terraform reworking their Unity3d build pipelines and configuring Team City introducing test suites and TDD to existing development teams working with the QA department to develop inter-project acceptance tests using capybara more»

21 Commandments for Greenfield Development

A Developer's Guide to New Projects  

The “greenfield” project is known by developers as a productivity Nirvana. It is a beautiful place where there is no legacy, no bugs and endless possibilities. It is also littered with mines. I’ve recently seen a number of anti-patterns around the creation and early growth new projects, and thought I’d summarize the anti-patterns I’d seen in the past as a guide for developers to avoid these common pitfalls. 1. Get a Pipeline in Place Early Run your tests automatically. more»

Continuous Integration Woes With Unity 3d

Why does Unity have such lackluster support?  

Unity, despite being one of (if not) the most prolific games frameworks in the industry, still provides a completely lackluster path to automation and CLI support. We can do better as a community.

DISCLAIMER:

I love the Unity framework. It’s my go-to framework for games development, and a cornerstone of the technology my company Immerse builds.

This blog post is a collection of frustrations, and while negative, I think it important to voice.

Because, despite all the fantastic work the Unity team has done recently, their automation story is quite simply an after-thought, and a glaring hole in an otherwise brilliant product.

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Cloud Native London

London DevOps Meetup  

Members of the Cloud Native London Meetup had the pleasure tonight to hear some amazing speakers. The first talk was called Switching Horses Midstream: The Challenges of Migrating 150+ Microservices to Kubernetes where Sarah Wells, the Technical Director for the Financial Times spoke about their migration from disperate Docker containers to a microservice architecture orchestrated with Kubernetes. The FT’s content platform team put our first containers live in mid-2015 and migrated the rest of our services over by April 2016. more»

Surgeons Who Won’t Sew

And What It Means for Your Engineering Team  

Then she gets up and leaves. The patient is still on dialysis, still bleeding in places, and their internal organs are still on show for everyone else in the room. The patient’s immediate future is secure, but eventually they are still going to bleed to death. As a DevOps engineer, perhaps one of the best things you can do for an engineering team is to empower them to write and utilize tests. more»

Deploying a Static S3 Website With Terraform

A Static Website with CDN Support  

In this video we will set up an automatic deployment CI/CD pipeline which deploys our static website to S3. We will then create a Terraform project which will orchestrate resources in AWS, and create an S3 bucket, and IAM user to use in our pipeline. With the IAM credentials and S3 bucket, we create a CircleCI workflow which builds our website from our GIT repository, and then pushes our rendered website to S3. more»

Your Production Environment Isn’t Always So Important

The Cost of Moving Slowly  

Until you have found product-market fit, your production environment is often just another test environment. It’s not testing your code, it’s testing your customers. At a previous startup company, we had a few hundred thousand users. Not all that many, but enough to get some interesting data and be in a position to use it to optimize the business. We had previously built a recommendation engine in Elasticsearch which all our users were piped through, and we user it to provide daily recommendations based on our most recent data. more»