This week was very interesting filled with unusual experiences. Shared learning is a tenet of DevOps so allow me to share my experiences with you. Hopefully, we all get better as a result. Let’s break down two experiences from this week.

You may have noticed on Twitter or in last week’s newsletter some mention about a webinar I was planning to take part in with Scalyr. I have canceled that. We were going to discuss DevOps in a Kubernetes world. I still might discuss that at some point with another audience. But, I’m not going to talk about it with the Scalyr team. It came down to something elementary, don’t insult anyone. Don’t make light of ANYONE even jokingly in a professional e-mail. With e-mail, there is no sarcasm, no tone, and context can sometimes be cloudy. Especially don’t insult yourself and your profession. I had a nice chat with Scalyr’s VP of Marketing and have forwarded the e-mails to CNCF (Scalyr reached out via the CNCF Speaker’s Bureau). I hope Scalyr has learned a valuable lesson. If you see Scalyr being even the slightest bit untoward, let me know, I’ll address it with them. Be the person you want your peers to epitomize.

Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is a hard, continuous, and iterative journey. When you make small wins, celebrate them accordingly. Celebrating small victories in a big way is disingenuous. Let’s face it the tech industry is terrible at this. Having a not all-male speaker lineup or panel seems to qualify as diverse these days. That is missing the boat on diversity and inclusion quite a bit though. While the group Red Hat assembled for Ansible Automates Chicago exceeded my minimum viable panel participation criteria of minimum one woman and one other underrepresented minority, I still wouldn’t call the Q&A panel diverse. I would concede it’s better than average. The industry needs to normalize diversity and inclusiveness. Should video games only be limited to the perfectly able? No! Another example of normalizing behavior, don’t introduce a woman as a woman that also does something. Introduce her based on accomplishments and accolades. We can do so much better as an industry and a society. Let’s get there together.

“Long-term consistency trumps short-term intensity.” —Bruce Lee

Use Lead Time Metric to Improve Your CI/CD Process
Check out GoCD’s latest blog in CD Metrics series. It talks about what lead time means in CD context and guides you on how to identify bottlenecks and improve your CI/CD process. SPONSORED

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 avoid friction during your DevOps journey. SPONSORED

DevOps’ish Top Five from Last Week

  1. Reaching for the Stars with Ansible Operator
  2. What Team Structure is Right for DevOps to Flourish?
  3. What is GitOps and why you should know about it
  4. DNS Servers That Offer Privacy and Filtering
  5. On Being A Principal Engineer

People

High prevalence of poor mental health among tech (specifically Ops) employees? — An /r/devops thread

Golang is the highest-paying skill in the US, report shows — Golang is an excellent language to know I hear. 😉😉😉

We Don’t Do That Here — A straightforward way to point out unappreciated behaviors.

Twelve ways to get smarter about Kubernetes — “Let’s boost your Kubernetes IQ, whether you’re an IT leader or working your way up.”

Announcing the 2019 Opensource.com Community Awards winners — I love this award program. But, I would like to see a Red Hatter category added. It’s odd to me that Red Hat employees are explicitly excluded.

Her Title: Cryptologic Technician. Her Occupation: Warrior. — One of my jobs for a while was prepping my intel counterparts to go on deployments just like this. I share it here because of the personal connection to the story.

Process

7 Habits Of Highly Effective CI/CD Pipelines — This is a little prescriptive as far as tooling goes. But, the principles are worth investigating.

Sysadmin’s three-line ‘annoyance-buster’ busts painstakingly crafted, crucial policy — “Whoops! I’ve broken the internet… but hey, everyone gets a coffee break”

Kubernetes at CERN: Use Cases, Integration and Challenges — A slide deck diving into Kubernetes use at CERN

How Uber Monitors 4,000 Microservices — A CNCF Case Study on Prometheus and a homegrown metrics store at Uber.

Diversity Scholarship Series: Why Not?

The Navy Needs 2 Tons of Storage Devices Burned to Ash — I have so many stories about the lengths to which the US government goes to make sure its secrets aren’t compromised. Here’s an interesting problem in that space.

Tools

Ansible Operator: What is it? Why it Matters? What can you do with it? — The Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat OpenShift teams have been collaborating to build a new way to maintain Kubernetes native applications: Ansible Operator.

The State of Kubernetes Configuration Management: An Unsolved Problem — This is a challenge I struggle with even for small applications. This is a nice breakdown of the tooling in this space too.

Which open source backup solution do you use? — I have a hodgepodge of some of these in play.

YAML for Network and Cloud Engineers

How to resize your images on-the-fly with OpenFaaS — One of these days I’m going to get around to image processing in CI. Resizing and optimizing should be able to be programmatic.

Getting started with Vim visual mode — Visual mode makes it easier to highlight and manipulate text in Vim.

20 VS Code Extensions You’ll Actually Use — I installed a few of these and am using them at the moment. One thing I wish was baked into VS Code is Settings Sync (scheduled syncs too). Also, GitLens is great.

Inspector Murphy, The Kubernetes quality enforcer

The first Kubernetes native IDE lands from Red Hat — I like the idea of this but, I don’t like the overhead of it. I have processing power and storage locally. But, if a Chromebook-like device is the device of the future, then it makes a ton of sense.

Using a single git repo to compare things between two upstreams — This is a nifty use of git I had never considered.

Kubernetes zero downtime deployment: when theory meets the database — Rolling updates with Kubernetes are fantastic!

Kubernetes for everyone — Interesting content from a product manager I work with at Red Hat, Tim Hildred.

Hacker Tools — “In this class, we’ll help you learn how to make the most of tools that productive programmers use.”

Fantastic! Public S3 Buckets and How to Find Them — “Discover how AWS communicates the creation of S3 buckets and the implications of relaxed permissions.”

SQL Series: From A to Z

alexellis/inlets — Expose your local endpoints to the Internet

robscott/kube-capacity — CLI that provides an overview of the resource requests, limits, and utilization in a Kubernetes cluster

abhishekkr/weeproxy — http reverse proxy for personal use]

ernoaapa/kubectl-warp — Kubernetes CLI plugin for syncing and executing local files in Pod on Kubernetes

nanovms/ops — Build and run nanos unikernels

adobe/ops-cli — Wrapper for Terraform, Ansible, and SSH for cloud automation

virtio-fs — Virtual filesystem optimized for container usage

sergiitk/pagerbeauty — PagerDuty on-call widget for monitoring dashboard. DataDog and Grafana compatible

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week

Two tweets of the week because both were too good not too share.

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