No introduction. Enjoy your week!

“Listen to your instinct, grab the opportunity when it presents itself and then give it your all.” —Helen Mirren

New Microsoft Azure Elastic Agent Plugin for GoCD
With GoCD’s new Azure plugin, run your CI/CD pipelines on Azure virtual machines, and let GoCD scale up on-demand agents based on your need. Remove bottlenecks and reduce the cost of your agent infrastructure.

Learn more about GoCD: www.gocd.org
Learn more about GoCD’s Azure plugin: https://extensions-docs.gocd.org/azure/current/ SPONSORED

Audiobook: Lean Enterprise
How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns that enable you to move fast at scale—and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization, rather than in just one department or team. Through case studies, you’ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. SPONSORED

DevOps’ish Top Five from Last Week

  1. What the Fork, Amazon?
  2. The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention
  3. How Airbnb Simplified the Kubernetes Workflow for 1000+ Engineers
  4. Kubernetes Patterns
  5. Kubernetes: AWS vs GCP vs Azure vs DigitalOcean

People

nomedium.dev — “Medium is Bad and You Should Stop Using It.” We’re developers, engineers, system administrators, and other really bright professions. We can figure out a better way to blog and share information than Medium. (Editor’s Note: At some point, Medium will be no longer be used as a source for this newsletter).

These hyper-secretive economists are transforming how Amazon does business — “Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year.”

5 Ways to Boost Your Earning Potential in DevOps — This article is surprisingly good. It’s sound advice.

DevOps hiring and training: 16 top-rated skills

How to Help Your Team with Burnout When You’re Burned Out Yourself — I definitely nabbed a PDF of this for frequent reference.

Defining a Distinguished Engineer — A fantastic checklist of things I attempt to (and often fail at) doing every, single day.

Meritocracy doesn’t exist, and believing it does is bad for you — “[I]n companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.”

The U.S. Desperately Needs a “Fiber for All” Plan — Given the next piece of evolutionary technology will likely be developed in someone’s basement office it is vitally important that we facilitate that as best as possible.

Process

Take the Accelerate State of DevOps survey today! — Can you spare some time to help the DORA research team know what it takes to make great software?

Defining “sustainable” for an open-source project — Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) delivers his talk, “If Open Source Isn’t Sustainable, Maybe Software Freedom Is?”

Blameless emerges from stealth with $20M investment to help companies transition to SRE — “The company currently has 23 employees and 20 customers including DigitalOcean and Home Depot.” I’m curious to see what these folks do.

BGP Show and Tell: Beginners — “New to BGP? This should definitely help!” BGP is a truly fascinating and handy routing protocol. Systems folks should not ignore it’s potential use cases.

Clippy briefly resurrected as Teams add-on, brutally taken down by brand police — The four people not a Microsoft employee that use Microsoft Teams wept.

Detecting the Kubernetes API Server DoS Vulnerability (CVE-2019-1002100) — If you do not measure traffic usage trends, looking for anomalies, then you’re missing some pretty early indicators of trouble.

Container storage outfit Portworx lands $27M funding round — A Portworx customer once told me Portworx wasn’t going to be around much longer. That was two years ago and they are so clearly wrong now.

Highly Effective Kubernetes Deployments with GitOps — “[GitOps] enables easy recovery from disaster, a simple and well understood operational model, and better security and audibility.”

U.S. Treasury Yield Curve Inverts for First Time Since 2007 — Not so great news for the US economy 😬😬😬😬😬

Tools

A Year of Kubernetes: Navigating Treacherous Waters - Container Journal — Igor Livshitz wrote a two-part piece looking at his experiences the past year with Kubernetes and the cloud native ecosystem. Also, where the community sits and security’s role going forward.

Running Kubernetes In The CI Pipeline For Integration and End-To-End Tests — “We want to run Kubernetes using what we already have installed and configured in the CI pipeline and usually that’s Docker. In this blog post, you’re going to see how you can do this by using kind and how is it going to change your experience.”

Elegantly activating a virtualenv in a Dockerfile — This blew some folks minds on Twitter this week. “When something seems needlessly complex, dig in and figures out how it works. The software you’re using might be simpler (or more simplistic) than you think, and with a little work you might come up with a more elegant solution.” Hot Damn!

Kubernetes devops productivity hacks — kubectx, terminal aliases, and a handful of other tools and tips for Kubernetes’ing with the best of them.

The Missing Introduction To Containerization — Feel like you’re missing something with containers? Look no further.

Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices: Start here — “Anyone can discuss containers, many people can demo them, but far fewer are successfully using containers and Kubernetes in a microservices architecture.”

The What and the Why of the Cluster API

Bite Size zine pack! — Julia Evan’s three Bite Size zines are for sale as a $28 pack! This is definitely one of those things you will buy, keep in your notes app as they evolve over the years, and reference at least once a quarter.

CI, and CI, and CI, oh my! (then more CI) — “A detailed post about the CI setup we use for exercising proposed changes to libpod (podman repo).” If you build things, this will interest you. podman is literally mentioned twice and it’s written by a GitHub employee (so stop with your Red Hat hate).

Banzai Cloud PKE CIS Kubernetes benchmark — This is quite the endorsement of Aqua Security’s tool for checking, “whether Kubernetes is deployed according to security best practices,” kube-bench.

Application-specific hardware accelerators — When you have a lot of compute like Facebook does, you build custom hardware for it.

How to run Ghost blogging software on Azure in a Linux Docker Container

Git Releases - The missing link to your latest GitHub release asset — I’ve always loathed the lack of a latest tag on GitHub releases. This helps with that!

Knative: What developers need to know — “Although making wholesale changes to your system just to incorporate the latest and greatest technologies is most often not a good idea, you should stay informed and prepared. I hope this short article helps point you in the right direction.” That’s a remarkable statement right there!

Move your dotfiles to version control — Be like a tennis shoe and just do it.

antonmedv/countdown — Terminal countdown timer

k14s/kapp — kapp is a simple deployment tool focused on the concept of “Kubernetes application” — a set of resources with the same label

mdlayher/homelab — Configuration management for Matt Layher’s machines. MIT Licensed.

Apple Releases New A12-Based iPad Air and iPad Mini — I bought one to hopefully replace the never-ending collection of notebooks that are becoming increasingly harder to write in. My iPad Pro was too heavy and only had 32 GB of storage (one movie and it was basically full). The new iPad Mini should fit the notepad, dictation tool, ebook, and game device fit the bill rather nicely. By the way, the Apple Veterans and Military Purchase Plan is great!

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week

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