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From Terraform to the AWS CDK: Weighing the Pros and Cons

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m a huge fan of Terraform. HashiCorp’s declarative configuration language has been my go‑to tool for provisioning everything from S3 buckets to complex Kubernetes clusters. Recently, however, I’ve been dabbling with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), which lets you define cloud resources using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, Python and Java. In this post we’ll examine some of the reasons teams consider migrating from Terraform to the CDK and discuss the trade‑offs involved.

Monday, October 20, 2025 Read
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Balancing DevOps and Mental Health: Strategies to Avoid Burnout

DevOps is often described as a culture rather than a job title. It is about breaking down silos, speeding up feedback loops, and empowering teams. But with great responsibility comes great stress. On-call schedules, production outages, incident retrospectives, and the constant pressure to move fast can take a toll on mental health. In this post I will share strategies that have helped me, and many of my colleagues, balance the demands of DevOps with the need for well-being.

Monday, October 6, 2025 Read
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Using AI Tools for DevOps: Productivity Without the Hype

Everyone seems to be talking about generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT and GitHub’s Copilot promise to revolutionise the way developers and operations engineers work. As someone who spends a lot of time writing infrastructure code and troubleshooting systems, I’ve been curious about how these tools actually fit into a DevOps workflow. Coding assistants for Infrastructure as Code I was initially sceptical of AI code generation. How could a language model understand the nuances of my Terraform modules or Kubernetes manifests? Surprisingly, Copilot has been most helpful for boilerplate code: writing resource blocks, suggesting module inputs, or drafting basic YAML for GitHub Actions. It won’t design your entire infrastructure, but it does save you from typing repetitive blocks. For example, when creating IAM policies, Copilot can scaffold the JSON and remind you of required keys.

Monday, September 29, 2025 Read
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Change Jenkins URL from CLI

Where did I go wrong?! Well, as I stated in Disabling Jenkins Security I am not experienced in managing Jenkins servers to the degree that I would like. And so when I perform updates I like to create an AMI backup and spin that one up to be able to test upgrades of packages and Jenkins itself. Once I started up the AMI I tried to access it with it’s public dns record. The only issue was it kept redirecting me over to the production version’s domain name.

Thursday, August 5, 2021 Read
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Disabling Jenkins Security

The start to my troubles So I started my day off the other day making an AMI of a Jenkins server, because we needed to update the server and wanted to make sure that the updates didn’t break anything. I ran into two issues when I started; the first was I couldn’t access the GUI and the Second was once I could access the GUI I couldn’t login due to the domain not matching for Google. Given I have very little experience with managing Jenkins (AWS Codebuild for the win), I had to hunt down how I could disable the security settings from the command line and files without breaking anything.

Thursday, August 5, 2021 Read