Introduction The number one reason people give up on learning Ansible is not Ansible. It is the lab. "I need three servers", "I don't have a cloud account", "my free tier expired", "the IPs changed again". So for my Ansible course I built a lab that runs entirely on your laptop, …

Disclosure - this post and the video are sponsored by Teleport. The architecture, the code and the opinions are entirely my own - I built and ran everything shown here myself, and the parts that broke are in here too. 👉 Want to build this yourself? Start with Teleport's agentic identity and access control page (the …

Every time I record a VPC video the same question comes back in the comments: "how did you decide on 10.0.1.0/24 for the public subnet and 10.0.2.0/24 for the private one?" The honest answer for a demo is "it was easy to type". The honest answer for a real environment is a lot longer, and I never …

In Part-1 we built one virtual network with subnets, a network security group and a route table. Real environments never stop at one - you end up with a dev VNet, a test VNet, a hub with the firewall, a spoke per team - and the first question is always the same: how does a VM in VNet A talk to a VM in VNet B …

This is the project video people keep asking me to write up - a real, end-to-end DevOps pipeline with nothing mocked: a Jenkins server that Terraform builds in one AWS region, a Jenkins pipeline that runs Terraform to build a second region, and at the end a Python Flask REST API talking to MySQL on RDS, behind an …

Disclosure - this post and the video are sponsored by Trigger.dev. The architecture, the code and the opinions are entirely my own - I built and tested everything shown here myself, and the parts that broke are in here too. 👉 Want to build this yourself? Start with the Trigger.dev Chat Agent documentation (the link …

Every EC2 instance we have launched in this series had a disk, and we never looked at it. That disk is an Amazon EBS volume, and in this Part-20 we are going to give it the attention it deserves - because storage is where the two expensive mistakes live: picking the wrong volume type (slow or overpriced) and losing …

Everything we built so far answers on an ugly name - jhooq-web-alb-1234567890.eu-central-1.elb.amazonaws.com. Users need www.jhooq.com, and that is DNS. Amazon Route 53 is the AWS DNS service - a domain registrar, an authoritative DNS server with a 100% availability SLA, health checks, and the routing policies that …

This is the companion page to my Ansible Full Course - Zero to Hero, a free three-hour-twenty-minute video that takes you from "what is Ansible" to deploying a website with roles, templates, handlers and a vault-encrypted secret. The video is the course; this page is what the video cannot be - searchable, …

This is the companion page to my free AWS Advanced Networking full course - eight hours in which one lab environment is built layer by layer, from an empty VPC to a multi-VPC, multi-account network with load balancers, a firewall, private connectivity, DNS and TLS. Every chapter of the video has a detailed written …