I had the opportunity to attend AWS bootcamp in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. The session I chose to attend was entitled "Securing Cloud Workloads with DevOps Automation". There were many interesting concepts discussed, all hinging around the new term 'DevSecOps'. In this post, I'd like to talk about what this is and how it relates to traditional DevOps.
With the current move to cloud computing, the need to scale applications presents itself as a challenge for storing data. If you are using a traditional relational database you may find yourself working on a complex policy for distributing your database load across multiple database instances. This solution will often present a lot of problems and probably won’t be great at elastically scaling.
As an alternative you could consider a cloud-based NoSQL database. Over the past few weeks I have been analysing a few such offerings, each of which promises to scale as your application grows, without requiring you to think about how you might distribute the data and load.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QHNsE9Y6Qs[/embed] Video of the recent 'Big Data the Cloud Way' presentation by Shine's Graham Polley and Shane Neubauer is now available. In it, Graham and Shane talk about how they used both the Google and Amazon cloud stacks at Telstra to query massive quantities of data...
WHAT A WEEKEND! I’m still recovering from the 24 hours of coding and the unhealthy amount of coffee and snacks I’ve ingested during this hackathon.
Two weeks ago, Melbourne was host to the first Battlehack of 2015. “What’s a Battlehack?” I hear you ask. Well Battlehacks are competitions sponsored by Braintree (a Paypal company) where teams of developers face off over 24 hours to create the most creative hack that benefits the local or global community. The venue, which was the Plaza Ballroom on Collins St was well worth a mention. The vast ballroom was decked out with food stations, sleep and massage stations, and most importantly, our hacking stations, or tables of 4 for the long night ahead. 
Anyone who’s ever had to support server infrastructure of any kind knows the value of having a comprehensive, automated monitoring solution in place. With this in mind, we have begun to roll out the New Relic platform to monitor all our AWS based servers. New Relic comes with many great monitoring metrics straight out of the box, but still has the flexibility for software developers to create their own plugins for customized metrics on just about anything your users will care about.