Blogs & Tutorials

A listing of all my blogs and tutorials

Building a Website Environment – How to Build a Web Server

In this tutorial we will look at how to build a web server. We will build upon what was covered in my series on what goes on Inside the Cloud, and build ourselves an environment to run a website. This tutorial will cover a single server setup running the entire environment, however in later blog […]

Logging and Audit Pic

Setting up Auditing & Logging of Files/Objects Using Native Windows File Server Tools

In this article I’d like to go through how to setup auditing and logging of files/objects using native Windows File Server tools. Some of my projects over the years have had workstreams implementing security and compliance objectives of logging and auditing activities, particularly file/object access. A lot of the solutions have used CyberArk and Centrify […]

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Designing Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are metrics that are used to measure the success of a strategy, programme or product. As strategies are implemented by programmes/initiatives, Programme Managers in particular, as well as Product Owners and Departmental Heads in general, are the ones that usually create the KPI for the initiative, build a consensus around them […]

DDOS

DDOS Attacks and Website Hacking

Very recently, this website suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. Following on from that, I thought I would write a short blog post on what happened, how I found out about it, the response to recover from the attack, and the lessons learnt. Firstly, this article will be heavily focused on AWS as […]

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A Short Guide to Calculating the Total Cost of Ownership of a Cloud

This is a shorter summarised version, of a longer and more detailed blog on calculating the total cost of ownership of a cloud platform. In this post, I cover the essence of how to calculate the TCO, what to include in it and my recommendations for calculating it. Build into the Architecture the Gathering of […]

Set Up CloudWatch Monitoring and Logging

This is a tutorial on how to setup monitoring and logging on a Debian Linux EC2 instance running a web server using Apache using AWS CloudWatch. CloudWatch does not provide disk (i.e. storage) and memory (i.e. RAM) utilisation metrics within it’s standards AWS CloudWatch options. For this, custom monitoring will have to be used through […]

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Using Product Roadmaps

What is a Product Roadmap? A product roadmap is a high-level plan describing how a product will come into being and how it will grow. It enables a Product Owner to express their vision of what the product should look like and a timeline of how that vision will be realised. A roadmap enables you […]

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Stakeholder Management: Using the Power-Interest Grid to Manage Stakeholders Better

I’ve come across, during my career as well as studying for certification, various takes on the same theme – stakeholder management using the Power Interest Grid. In this blog, I will cover my approach for classifying and managing stakeholders using the grid, and recommendations for engaging with the different stakeholder groups. Stakeholder management is a […]

Upgrade

How to Upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS

In this user guide, we will cover upgrading the Operating System (OS) of our server, in our example, a web server, running Ubuntu 16.04 to version  18.04. Version 18.04 was released of 18.04 on 26 April 2018. With many servers running  Ubuntu being web servers, they also run PHP, and with the latest version of […]

Consensus Driven Programme & Product Management

Programme and Product Managers make various decisions, from deciding on the work schedule (Programme Managers) to the detailed functionality of the products (Product Managers). As with any decision, there is always a risk that that decision has not been made effectively or obtained necessary agreement as the correct one with stakeholders. In this blog post, […]

Successfully Managing Innovation & Maintenance

One of the challenges I’ve come across in my career, and have seen CTOs and technology organisations face, irrespective of their size, is reconciling the Agile processes, competing priorities and schedules for introducing new features to a product (i.e. product innovation) with bug fixes and smaller improvements (i.e. maintenance and patching). In this blog post […]