This week was REALLY hard. The past two weeks are the anniversary of the worst two week span of my life. In 2001, I was working like a dog at Langley AFB, VA. It was great work but the hours were LONG. With a normal shift, training, and other fun outside of work hours military things there was a lot going on. Then my grandmother died. Not earth shattering but it was another ratcheting up of the stress levels
Then I got very sick. I had to seek treatment in an ER after work one day for flu-like symptoms. September 7, 2001, the day after the ER visit, I learned one of my best friends had passed away overnight at the age of 20. I had recently seen him a couple of times the previous weeks between visits to UNC and him to Newport News, VA. On the way to the funeral, I completely broke down when passing the highway exit towards Chapel Hill, NC.
September 10th, we decided to overnight at my parent’s house in Hickory, NC. The morning of 9⁄11, I had woken up early and watched the incidents break at WTC. By the time the Pentagon was hit, we were hauling ass back to Virginia. The emotions of the event led to a series of decisions that ultimately led to my injury that now causes me constant issues. The physical injury and damage to the psyche are permanent.
A visit with my psychiatrist this week led me to understand some things about dealing with the trauma of these events. We developed a plan to steel myself during this time of year.
The Ansible team was pushing hard to get Ansible Tower 3.3 ready to release this past Wednesday. I was also prepping a talk for the Grand Rapids Red Hat User Group. Julie’s birthday is coming up and planning for that has been next to impossible to focus on. It’s like all my buffers were full and throwing stuff to /dev/null at random. It was a lot to run with all at once. As I told someone, “Hard week personally, great week professionally.”
There are three things I am now permanently marking in my calendar as recurring events. On the business day before 9/11, I will have an appointment with my psychiatrist. From 2019 to whenever my working life ends, I will be taking paid time off on the day of 9⁄11. This year I worked late helping tie up things before Hurrican Florence inundated Red Hat HQ. Towards the end of the day, I did have a moment or two to reflect on the day. Early in the day, I was anxious and nervous. I was easily distracted by simple things. My routine after lunch walk with my dog helped. I realized that I needed to lock down a few things then triage a few other before getting out of the office that day. The anxiety didn’t fade. But, the distractions were gone.
I will also be blocking out the 5th through the 13th of September every year as “no public speaking” (and mindfully limited travel). I did okay in Grand Rapids but, it wasn’t my best me. Anxieties of work, the history of the day, prepping and presenting a talk were too much for me to perform at a level high enough to do myself justice.
I was going to write about Azure DevOps this week. I have talked to several Microsoft folks about the product called DevOps. I have feelings and thoughts on the topic for sure. But, this felt more pertinent and has honestly been therapeutic to write. It might shock some people but, I’m human too. Thank you for reading. Stay safe out there.
Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night 2018
I will be matching confirmed contributions made by DevOps’ish readers (up to $200). Please forward your receipts to me by 2018-09-24.
To Donate to Kim’s Team: https://pages.lightthenight.org/nc/Triangle18/KHaught
To Donate to Chris’ Team: https://pages.lightthenight.org/nc/Triangle18/CHaught
Remediation Strategy for Continuous Delivery of Microservices
In systems based on microservices architecture, you have multiple services getting updated frequently. How do you respond when a deployment of a service introduces instability or bugs? Sheroy Marker offers some remediation strategies in this blog. SPONSORED
Webinar: DevSecOps meets GitOps with Twistlock and Weaveworks (09/25 10am PT)
Learn tools and techniques for: implementing security across your Kubernetes pipeline, implementing an automated GitOps model, achieving SOC 2 compliance and gaining full observability into your production environments with workload dashboards and customizable alerts. Register today SPONSORED
Cloud Native DevOps with Kubernetes
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People
Love Ansible? We want to hear from you! Tell us how you’re innovating. Tell us how you got started. What do you do with the time that Ansible helps you save?
Leaving Chef: Nathen Harvey, quite possibly one of the nicest people in the DevOps sphere, is leaving Chef.
Python joins movement to dump ‘offensive’ master, slave terms: Programming language bites its tongue to be more inclusive
A UW professor argued that women don’t want to code. What do women computer scientists have to say?: Six women computer scientists from the University of Washington respond to an essay about why women don’t pursue computer science as often as men.
‘Impostor syndrome’ affects almost 58% of tech professionals: Eek!
Melinda Gates’ New Research Reveals Alarming Diversity Numbers: “Over the past decade, the ratio of black, Latina, and Native American women receiving computing degrees has dropped by a third, from 6 percent to just four percent.”
How Companies Can Ensure Maternity Leave Doesn’t Hurt Women’s Careers: “Imagine that a temporary absence from your workplace could lead to 10 years of sustained high performance being forgotten.”
SRE Anti-Pattern: “I Could Fix It, If I Could Get To It”: “The common enterprise problem of disjointed access. Often the people responding to an incident are blocked from taking the required recovery actions even though they have the first-hand knowledge and experience needed to know what to do.”
Process
Plex Shuts Down Its Cloud Service: Compute heavy SaaS offerings isn’t a good idea for a consumer level product it seems.
Forbes Cloud 100: Notable mentions include Stripe, Zoom, CrowdStrike, Elastic, Mailchimp (powers this newsletter), PagerDuty, Hashicorp, Fastly, Digital Ocean, JFrog, and Pendo
Tech startup Pendo has raised more than $100 million. Can it become the next Red Hat?
U.S. Silently Enters New Age of Cyberwarfare: How are our cyberweapons better than Russian cyberweapons that unleashed NotPetya on the world? We will find out soon enough.
A Guide To Service Level Objectives, Part 2: It All Adds Up: A simple primer on the complicated statistical analysis behind setting your Service Level Objectives.
2018: The Biggest Year for Open Source Software Ever!: 2018 is a break out year for OSS acquisitions. Three seven figure acquisitions occurred over the past three months including MuleSoft, Magento, and Suse.
The ‘DevOps encompasses culture and collaboration’ myth destroyed: Not a terrible point. I would still rather work with folks than work only with technology though. I am indeed, human.
What our summit in South Africa taught me about cybersecurity: Cybersecurity is a necessity, but it’s often treated as an afterthought. What it has in common with modern photography could tell us how to make it less painful to achieve.
Key question in Toronto’s bid for Amazon HQ2: ‘Does Jeff Bezos want to piss off Trump?’: Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes.
6 DevOps culture mistakes holding you back: You’re not listening. You have a revolving door problem. You’re drowning in heroism. Read up on six factors blocking your DevOps success – and how to fix them
Container monitoring and security firm Sysdig raises $68.5M round: Congrats to the folks at Sysdig.
AWS — Ready for the Next Storm: Hurricane Florence is ravaging my old state. It’s a reminder that not only are the people affected by storms but so is modern industry.
Continuous Delivery of Microservices - Remediation Strategy: “How do you respond when a deployment of a service introduces instability or bugs? How do you ensure changes to an API are backwards compatible? We try to answer these questions in this post.”
SaltStack Expands into Security Compliance Scanning and Remediation: 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
DevOps Chat: Cloud-Native Security with Twistlock CEO Ben Bernstein: “In this DevOps Chat, we talk funding, serverless and cloud-native security with Ben.”
Scrutinizing SPIRE to Sensibly Strengthen SPIFFE Security: “In this post, we introduce the expected security properties of the SPIFFE Runtime Environment (SPIRE), and discuss show how we can begin to systematically estimate the risk of attacks.”
7 Promises, and Potential Pitfalls, in Adopting a Cloud Native Approach to DevOps
Tragedy of the Commons Clause: Oh this horse isn’t dead yet?
Building + testing open source monitoring tools: A lot of testing talk. Very useful if you’ve ever wondered what a standard testing business unit should be doing.
Tools
DNS over TLS - Thoughts and Implementation: In this post we’ll survey DNS over TLS, implement a client and share some thoughts!
Linux System Roles: A collection of roles and modules executed by Ansible to assist Linux admins in the configuration of common GNU/Linux subsystems.
How to deploy WordPress and MySQL on Kubernetes: I often think the best way to teach someone (or yourself) to use a new tool is to incorporate it into the installation or use of Wordpress. It’s a great use case when you factor in DNS, storage, CDN, etc.
nginx-ingress vs kong vs traefik vs haproxy vs voyager vs contour vs ambassador vs istio ingress: There are so many damn Kubernetes ingresses. I can’t keep up with them and thanks to Steven Acreman, I don’t have to anymore.
Multi Account Command: runs any command in the context of the AWS Named Profile(s) specified
Building a finance tracking REST API using Go with TDD - Part 1: From Ruby to Go
Fixing an old hack - why we are bumping the IPv6 MTU
Build and Deploy Functions to Cloudflare’s 152+ Data Centers with Serverless
Jaeger Operator for Kubernetes: “Kubernetes Operators are a set of components that can be installed in a given cluster to make it easier to manage a group of resources (deployments, services, …) as if they were native Kubernetes resources.”
AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for Shell Access to EC2 Instances: You can now use a new browser-based interactive shell and a command-line interface (CLI) to manage your Windows and Linux instances.
urcomputeringpal/kubevalidator: A GitHub App that uses kubeval to validate all of that Kubernetes YAML in your repo
Magic Sandbox: Master Kubernetes by doing.
PagerDuty Introduces Two New Products to Help Companies Shift From Reactive to Proactive by Identifying Business Impact and Analyzing Operational Performance: Longest. Headline. Ever.
Move Your Cron Jobs to Serverless in 3 Steps: In case you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster laying around.
jessfraz/bpfd: Framework for running BPF programs with rules on Linux as a daemon. Container aware.