I spent most of the week in Raleigh, North Carolina in and around Red Hat Tower. I was in a two-day All Product Marketing Summit. My boss is so amazing though. She asked how I was holding up at one point (that’s what builds psychological safety). My response, “This is kinda close to my personal hell. Not trying to be dramatic. But, ya, I’m super uncomfortable.” Then something rather Red Hat happened.

Red Hat investors approve $34B merger agreement with IBM. Jim Whitehurst decided to take the investor call to certify the investor vote in the Red Hat Annex where we were having our meeting. Jim is a dynamic leader. His time as COO at Delta made him appreciate process, rigor, and discipline. When he came to Red Hat, he adapted in a way most leaders might never have been able to. After the investor call, Jim decided to talk to us group of technical and product marketers. This is not your stereotypical group of marketing folks; there are Kubernetes and Ansible contributors in the room as well as Red Hat product contributors.

We grilled Jim with very tough questions. They were all answered with grace and candor. It’s rare that employees can see that in their CEO. It’s beyond refreshing to see this and I still look forward to being a part of this ride at Red Hat.

Triangle DevOps presents DevOps is Not War with Chris Short of Red Hat
Over the past 500 years, there have been 16 cases of a rising power threatening to displace a ruling power. 75% of those cases resulted in war. Although your organizational transformation probably won’t lead to war, it could be contentious. History can help prevent conflict when driving change. This talk will analyze human tendencies, historical data, and provide real-world examples of how to prevent conflict during your DevOps journey. SPONSORED

The real story on container, cloud, and data adoption
Poll results reveal where and why organizations choose to use containers, cloud platforms, and data pipelines. SPONSORED

Continuous delivery on modern infrastructure - Run GoCD on Kubernetes
Model Docker-based build workflows more effectively with our GoCD Kubernetes integration. Run GoCD natively on Kubernetes, define your build workflow and let GoCD provision and scale build infrastructure on the fly. SPONSORED

Last Week’s Top Five

  1. AWS gives open source the middle finger
  2. Jenn’s Guide to Thriving in Tech
  3. Google Cloud Production Guideline
  4. I’m a Red Hat Certified Specialist: Ansible Automation
  5. 5 open source tools to upgrade your next Kubernetes project

People

MacKenzie Bezos and the Myth of the Lone Genius Founder — I fully recognize the fact that I’m able to do everything I can do because my significant other does a lot that I can’t. Be humble and thankful out there to everyone.

Five Things To Look For On A DevOps Resume — The skillsets needed to execute DevOps are relatively rudimentary on their own. Finding folks with the combination of minimum viable skills required is harder than it seems though.

The 50 Best Workplaces in Technology 2019 — Congrats to Red Hat, my employer, on making #5 on this list. I have a similar list of places I’d be willing to work tailored to myself and my needs (in alphabetical order):

  • Cloud Native Computing Foundation
  • Fastly
  • GitLab
  • Google Cloud
  • Linux Foundation
  • Microsoft
  • PagerDuty
  • Red Hat

Why these young tech workers spent their Friday night planning a rebellion against companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook — The FAANGs have gotten so big the only way to correct them is through their employees.

Process

Do we really need network automation? — Hell yes you do!

9 Kubernetes Security Best Practices Everyone Must Follow - Cloud Native Computing Foundation – Here’s your Kubernetes minimum viable security checklist.

Atlassian admits it did Kubernetes ’the hard way’ — Literally the last thing I’d ever want to hear about Kubernetes, “Our clusters are as close to artisanal as you can get, I would say.”

Kubernetes security: 4 tips to manage risks — “As you bear down on Kubernetes security, use these strategies to avoid missteps in work with containers and orchestration”

How I Hacked Play-with-Docker and Remotely Ran Code on the Host — This is fascinating. Walk through the process of breaking things in containerland because wow.

On Infrastructure at Scale: A Cascading Failure of Distributed Systems — A deep dive into how an outage confirmed that smaller, more numerous Kubernetes clusters were better, the Docker daemon is a single point of failure, and the importance of sidecars.

What is Small Scale Scrum? — “Here’s how the scrum agile methodology can help teams of three or fewer work more efficiently.”

Containers Are Poised To Quash VMware In 2019 — Some predictions around the container, virtualization, and cloud spaces as it relates to VMware.`

What startups should know about ITIL® — The thing to keep in mind is that ITIL is a framework. If you treat it like a guide book people are going to hate you. With that being said, if your startup wants to be acquired at some point you’re going to have to think about the functions of ITIL and emulate them in your organization.

Three things to look for if you want to earn more in DevOps — This should be written as three things when looking for a job, period.

MongoDB “open-source” Server Side Public License rejected — It should come as no surprise Red Hat is not going to keep MongoDB around with the license that’s currently in place for the project.

Tools

Kubernetes and the Return of the Virtual Machines — The New Stack dives into the Kubernetes virtual machine world.

A Crash Course For Running Istio — There is significant power in Istio. But, there’s also significant complexity.

Open Sourcing our Kubernetes Tools — Tumblr has shared some of their Kubernetes tooling with us all.

Kubernetes vs. Docker: A Primer — Docker is a container engine. Kubernetes is a container orchestrator. Docker, the company, has a competing Kubernetes project called Docker Swarm. Docker, again the company, also has a lot of products in the Kubernetes space too. I can see why this is confusing af to people now.

Automating Datacenter Operations at Dropbox — How Dropbox manages things in their datacenters.

Ansible vs. Puppet: Declarative DevOps tools square off — While reading this it wasn’t clear who the winner would be. It’s nice to see an unbiased take on Ansible vs. Puppet.

The Life of a GitHub Action — GitHub Actions are a thing that I want to be good. GitLab CI is so far ahead here. It’s going to be interesting to see if GitHub tries to achieve feature parity or differentiates (or a little of both).

Turn a Raspberry Pi 3B+ into a PriTunl VPN — Having used PriTunl for production work in the past, I might set this up just on the chance SSH tunnels don’t cut it for me someday.

How to Create An SSH Tunnel in Go — Or maybe I’ll use SSH tunnels in Go as opposed to PriTunl.

Containerization of Golang applications — I need to containerize ssl-tester so I can actually maintain the project better. This article will come in handy.

Get started with WTF, a dashboard for the terminal — Next time I’m doing production work this will come in handy.

Podman v1.0.0 Released — Congrats on the 1.0 release, Podman team!

google/go-containerregistry — Go library and CLIs for working with container registries

webpro/awesome-dotfiles — A curated list of dotfiles resources.

nektos/act — Run your GitHub Actions locally

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week

Notes from this week’s issue can be found on GitHub.