Ansible
Ansible Vault, Roles and the Road to Production
Encrypt secrets with Ansible Vault and keep them out of logs, refactor playbooks into a role, lean on lint and CI, and name what actually changes when this becomes real infrastructure.
Automation
Ansible
Ansible Templates and Safe Configuration Rollouts
Render per-host configuration from Jinja2 templates, validate it before the service reloads into it, and roll the change across a fleet one host at a time with serial.
Ansible
Deploy nginx with Ansible: Handlers, Reloads and Health Checks
Install nginx, deploy a page and meet handlers: the Ansible mechanism that reloads a service only when something actually changed, with a health check that fails the run when the service does not answer, verified against real systemd.
Ansible
Write Your First Real Ansible Playbook: Baseline a Linux Server
Turn ad-hoc commands into a repeatable playbook that brings Linux servers to a known baseline, with check mode, diff mode and idempotence explained properly.
Ansible
Understand Ansible Inventory, Facts and Ad-Hoc Commands
Learn how Ansible decides which hosts to manage, how to run ad-hoc commands against groups, and how to use facts to answer real operational questions.
AWS
Dynamic AMI Selection in AWS CloudFormation: Leveraging SSM Parameter Store
In Demystifying AWS CloudFormation, we used static AMI mappings for an EC2 template. It works but needs updates and fails across regions. SSM Parameter Store fixes this, fetching fresh AMI IDs dynamically. This guide swaps mappings for SSM, with a full template to simplify AMI management.
AWS
Demystifying AWS CloudFormation: Understanding Key Template Sections
A Beginner's Guide to AWS CloudFormation - This covers the basics of CloudFormation and includes a complete working template to deploy an EC2 instance with a security group.
proxmox
Build Kubernetes-Ready Ubuntu 24.04 Templates in Proxmox
This article builds upon my previous guide, Mastering Proxmox Automation: Build an Ubuntu 24.04 Cloud-Init Template, where I walked through creating basic Ubuntu 24.04 Cloud-Init templates. Today, we're taking this a step further by building a Kubernetes-optimised template with flexible resource configuration. The