Welcome To The Vibrato Blog

Our partnership with Google Cloud has allowed me an opportunity to explore Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) Big Data and Cloud Data Warehouse technologies. I recently helped a client pursue a Proof of Concept in order to explore the viability of using GCP's Cloud Dataflow and BigQuery services in order to uplift their reporting and analytics capability.

Forge is a project which I’d had on the back burner for some time now, and in early 2018, I decided to embark upon developing it. The idea behind it is to make it easier to deploy CloudFormation stacks from Continuous Delivery platforms by decreasing the boilerplate logic required in all of a team’s pipelines.

If you're not already considering the impact of Open Banking on your business, industry and personal life, you need to be. Now. The rise of Open Banking will change the fabric of commerce in Australia. It will drive innovation, encourage increased competition and usher in an entirely new financial services playing field. This article is poised as a primer into Open Banking and the predicted impacts of releasing data and using it to personalise transactions. 

Necessity is the mother of invention and even with all the tools provided by our partners, Vibrato’s engineers still find that there are times when there’s a gap in a service and they have to do some development. Automation Engineer and Vibrato's resident HashiCorp expert, Tristan Morgan had an AWS key issue that he set out to solve by creating his own tool.

At Vibrato we love the fact that Azure Web Apps enables our customers to deliver and host their web applications with ease, without having to worry about setting up any underlying hosting infrastructure. Sumo Logic is a powerful software-as-a-service cloud-hosted log analytics platform, and we also love Sumo Logic because customers can get started with gaining insights from their logs very quickly, without having to worry about setting up any underlying logging infrastructure.

It's with much excitement that Vibrato welcomes Aurelie Viger to their team in Sydney. Aurelie brings an amazing history of DevOps and Community Pioneering in Sydney to the team in her new role as the Client Engagement Executive. Aurelie has been on an amazing journey in the industry and comes with a vast history in sales and community brilliance all over Australia. The team is excited about the solution that we'll be taking to market in 2018 with Aurelie's help, and look forward to empowering our clients to do amazing things this new year for their customers.

Scenarios

An environment without Secret Management

I arrived on site at the client and things could’ve been a lot better. There were password protected zip files containing more passwords, sticky notes stuck to monitors and desktop applications with names that sounded like saying “psychotic” with a lisp. When an application needed a password to connect to another service it would be promptly written to a config file and checked into version control. Rotating a password meant RDPing into a machine with an administrator account and typing in the new password, trying to remember which server was updated first. Databases were configured with admin accounts and the passwords were left untouched with numbers like '123' slapped on the end. They need a credential/secret management service and starting on a new cloud provider was a good time to create some good habits going forward.

The Problem

Vibrato was recently engaged by a large retailer to work with their IT teams to migrate their on-premises workloads to a cloud environment. We faced a few challenges along the way...

Nathen Harvey, Chief Awesome Officer at Chef, wrote the book about professional hugging and has had numerous interesting and funny forays into internet advertising for his ideas. If you don't believe me, you need only watch his promotion of HugOps. So when Vibrato found out that he would be in Australia, we snapped up the opportunity to have him come and have a chat with our employees, clients and partners.

Two weeks ago, Vibrato's CEO Pete Gatt published an article saying that Vibrato were finalists for an ARN award. The following Thursday night Pete proudly took the stage to accept an award for Customer Wins in the Start-Up category.

This week of September marks the third instalment of HashiConf, in Austin TX. The bustling little city where it's a sure bet you'll find hot weather, great music and some of the finest BBQ. As the community descends upon this location you'll hear great conversation around the latest principals and practices of software delivery, automation and operations.

We've all been looking forward to finding out what HashiCorp sees as the future of software. Vibrato has always been a proponent of HashiCorp technologies as they forge some of the best performing tools in the DevOps space. I'm going to recap some of the exciting technologies on the horizon that are being discussed at HashiConf and that Vibrato also sees as the future of software delivery.

Vibrato has been very pleased to partner with Rider Levett Bucknall Australia (RLB), market leaders in costs and project management for flagship building projects like the Sydney Opera House and the 2012 London Olympics.

Microsoft's commitment to open source software makes Azure a great platform for running these types of solutions. But having provisioned multiple open source services, what's the best way to integrate them?what you may not know is that Azure Functions provides the 

Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) gives you a powerful, centralised platform on which to collaborate, build and deploy applications quickly and easily. Many organisations already use it to build their . NET-based applications, but did you know that VSTS offers strong integration with open source products, and that you can run a VSTS agent on a Linux platform as well as Windows?

Service-driven architecture and micro services are changing the way we build and deliver applications in the cloud.  Although it seems that we are all going to have to care about "traditional" servers for a while yet, most businesses are nevertheless looking at the opportunities on offer through cloud-native services and applications.

I'm very excited to announce that last night, I had the ability to give back finally after some 14 years alumni and have Vibrato sponsor our very own cadet! James and I would like to congratulate Connor Sutton on becoming Vibrato's very first Doxa Cadet and wish him well on starting his Advanced Diploma in Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at Swinburne University. Connor is not only an amazing guy with a bubbly and enthusiastic personality, but he's also one of the most switched on technical people we've come across at such a young age. If you get a chance, please reach out to Connor to congratulate him or swing past our offices from time to time as I'm sure we're gonna get him buried in some cool robotics and automation soon!

Access control is key to building a secure cloud offering. In the rapidly developing world of cloud computing, user and group creation can quickly get out of hand and become unmanageable. Locking down standards and patterns early in your cloud journey will help you avoid this pitfall down the road.

Over the years at Vibrato, we’ve worked with a plethora of clients ranging from aspiring startups to multi-continental enterprises, which has positioned us really well to design patterns around identity and access management on cloud environments in line with all stages of business maturity. While complexity levels will differ, the most important aspects of approaches to identity management are definability, scalability and consistency. This post is targeted towards AWS with ADFS as a SAML provider specifically, but these principles apply across all cloud providers.

Inline with Vibrato's mission to automate everything, Alvin Oh explores how to use CHEF to automate IBM Websphere (WAS v8.5) in a Microsoft Windows environment.

Since the debut of Vagrant in January 2010, Hashicorp has now stepped it up to a total of 8 open source products, and 1 commercial offering. I’m proud to say that I was at the first Hashiconf ever, hosted in Portland, Oregon. Three hundred engineers descended on this big culture, small town location, and enjoyed 2 days of presentations and discussion on Packer, Vagrant, Terraform, Consul, Vault, Serf and Atlas.