With 2015 behind me, and 2016 ahead, it's that time of the year where I reflect on the past year. This is really a retrospective, and in the same way that my team conducts agile retrospectives as part of our workflow, I thought I'd approach the past year in that stop/start/continue fashion.

I've spent more time than I'd like this week being perplexed by spurious behaviour in creating a replicated MySQL environment in RDS, with CloudFormation. RDS supports creating up to five MySQL read-replicas to slave off of a running MySQL master. Configuring this using the web console involves selecting a master RDS instance and selecting the option to create a read-replica. Before the read-replica is created, a configuration page allows various parameters to be reviewed and updated. By default, key parameters such as the size and storage class of the attached EBS volumes are inherited from the master.

If you've been working with Linux servers for any length of time then you've used SSH to connect to a server. Though the way you use SSH and the features you use may vary, SSH is incredibly powerful and has a lot of features the average user may not be aware of, or use. I don't want to say this is a post about power user features, or a list of hidden tips and tricks; the more you use something, the more you understand it, and more efficiently use it. This post is just a collection of features I use that others I've seen don't, and may prove useful to others.

This is necessarily quite a long article with many sections. The goal of this post is to share the tools I use on a daily basis to get the job done, and where appropriate, give some insight into how I use them. It may prove useful to others who have asked about the tools I use in the past, or it may prove an interesting retrospective on how things have changed in years to come. I've split this article into three main sections, covering the main desktop apps, web apps, and console tools I use. While some of these apps and tools may be available for other Operating Systems, I'm primarily a Mac / OSX user.

The cat's out of the bag and the dust has settled. I'm moving on from Cloudreach; though not for any particularly negative reasons, it was just the right time for me, for a number of reasons. Cloudreach are continuing to grow and are actively recruiting for a number of roles, so if you're interested in an exciting, fast-paced operations role in an AWS certified Managed Services Partner, then look no further.