James Read's Code, Containers & Cloud blog

I’ve been working at Red Hat for for 13 years, so people will often come to me ask for guidance of where to get started with their Red Hat certification journey. So many people have heard of the RHCE - the Red Hat Certified Engineer exam, which remains one of the most respected IT certifications in the industry, let alone just Linux certifications. Many of these same people have years of Linux experience, but maybe haven’t taken a Red Hat certification before, or in a long time, and are looking for recommended next steps.

This is a blog post written as a summary of notes, following my learnings from an AI course I completed back in 2019 that I feel is still incredibly relevant in 2024]({{ rel ‘../how-useful-way-my-ai-short-course-from-2019/’ }}). AI is a huge field with an expansive history extending over the last century, it might be easy to be fooled into thinking thay AI was just something we found in the last 5 years. However, the recent surge of interest cannot be ignored - popularized by easy and cheap access to incredibly sophisticated models like ChatGPT.

In 2019 I could see that AI was a technology gaining increasing interest and relevance, and I was keen to get ahead of the hype and start learning more. At the time I was feeling like my day to day routine was getting a bit boring, and too familiar, and I wanted to make sure I had a solid grasp of what I thought would become a fundamental building block of technology for the future, and I decided to take a course on the topic of AI.

I am so sick and tried of changing task management systems, I will just be using plain .txt files from now on. In the last 10 years, I have tried so many different systems for organising my work and my personal life and yet I’ve not been able to keep using one of them after a few weeks or months. After all this time I think I’ve finally come to the realisation that they all suffer from the same inadequacies.

It can be a real effort to bring yourself to write articles to maintain a healthy blog, and sometimes the simple articles are best. Therefore, I just want to take a quick few moments to talk about a tool that I just cannot live without now-a-days, when writing Go code, I am always live-reloading with Air in the background. It’s really valuable for developers to be able to get fast feedback on the code that they are writing.

A fault domain (or failure domain) is essentially a set of resources, or components that share a common point of failure. One example of this is an Azure Availability Zone, or your own single Data Center. Typical points of failure for a fault domain are power (with no backup generator), or cooling, or a datacenter is served by a single network connection. The term “fault domain” could theoretically be applied to smaller areas of an application architecture, like a single network, or a rack of servers, but this article considers a fault domain more from a cloud architecture definition.

Google Photos, the free, easy to use, on-for-many-android-users service has been the single Photo backup strategy for many of those who have used it, since it was released in 2015. I, for one, was amazed to discover that I have uploaded photos dating as far back as 2005, totalling over 80Gb. Initially, Google photos seemed like that ultimate, hassle-free, cloud backup service that would never be replaced…. However, as time went on, I found myself growing increasingly concern about cloud services that “own” my personal data.

I love Ansible, and I love doing certifications - so this was a no-brainer. In this blog I’ll talk about how I prepared, how the exam felt, was it worth it, and at the end I’ll even explain why I used a cow image as the cover for this blog post! ¹

It’s been interesting to witness the meteoric rise of “Docker” over the years, and it is undoubted that the technology that was pioneered and popularized by Docker (more correctly called “Linux Containers”), is here to stay for the long run. The rise of the technology was partially due to the ease of publishing containers, enabled by free DockerHub service. However, in this article, I propose that DockerHub as a single repository of container images is becoming less and less important than it once was, and in it’s place, GitHub is a strong contender to take over as the 1 repository for containers — as it has its sights on being everything a developer needs.

Chat that is always compatible, updated, and integrates with browser extensions. Too many chat apps — can’t change that. The amount of chat applications and protocols out there now-a-days is getting absolutely crazy. It’s like in the 1990s, when we had ICQ, AIM, IRC, and others. For a little while, I felt like things were getting better — I got down to just 2 chat apps!… Fast-forward to today — the chat apps I need are unfortunately even more than in the 90s.