This Monday (2019-08-19) will be my first day as Principal Technical Marketing Manager on the Cloud Platforms team at Red Hat. What does that mean? OpenShift (a lot of OpenShift), Kubernetes, containers, Operators, and all the associated bits will be my day job. Helping folks help themselves with technology is still and always will be the name of my game. But, working full time in the Kubernetes or cloud native ecosystem was a 2020 goal. Crossing off 2020 goals in 2019. #winning Read More…

DevOps’ish Last Week’s Top Five

  1. DevOps For Dummies Cheat Sheet by Emily Freeman
  2. Syslog: The Complete System Administrator Guide
  3. Regex For Noobs (like me!) - An Illustrated Guide
  4. DevOps For Dummies by Emily Freeman (Amazon)
  5. Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

Note: DevOps’ish may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Events

Event season is upon us but the good news is DevOps’ish has discounts to some of the hottest events this year.

PagerDuty Summit 2019 is Sept 23-25 in San Francisco. It’s three days of interactive workshops, keynotes, and breakouts with topics focusing on cutting edge incident response techniques, resilience engineering, managing team health, continuous improvement, DevSecOps, machine learning, and other intersections with real-time operations. Join experts from Google, Microsoft, Hashicorp, Twilio, Salesforce, Gremlin, Honeycomb, Adobe, AWS, and more. Register with code PDS19DOISH to save 50% and attend for $350. SPONSORED

AnsibleFest is coming to Atlanta! There are some amazing sessions that are lined up for this year. I’m also happy to say that there will be a number of sessions about containers and Kubernetes. This includes the “Building Kubernetes Operators with Ansible Hands-On Workshop” I’ll be helping with. Take 20% off standard rates using discount code ANFCSDO19 when registering. Come see what my awesome Red Hat friends have put together for us!

Sensu Summit is offering DevOps’ish readers $300 off the full price ticket price. “Enjoy two days of talks, workshops, and great conversations about all things monitoring.”

DevOpsDays Raleigh 2019 is October 1st and 2nd! DevOps’ish readers can take $10 off admission with discount code DODR2019-ISH when registering. See you in Raleigh!

People

X-Team Is Hiring a Team of DevOps Engineers (Remote)
We are looking for passionate DevOps engineers to work with the world’s leading brands, from anywhere. We love to work with Kubernetes, Docker, Serverless, and AWS tools. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers. Join X-Team SPONSORED

Pivotal CTO: Kubernetes means we’re all distributed systems programmers now — We’re all, “There’s no way you can possibly understand this whole stack” programmers now, indeed.

Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture — I’m a He/Him/They. I put it on my web site, emails, social media, etc. It makes a difference. Be an ally.

Three Years of Misery Inside Google, the Happiest Company in Tech — Is Google even a decent place to work at this point? I’ve toured their offices and know a lot of people there that don’t seem pissed about their jobs. Most of them seem quite happy actually. But, damn, the bad news about Google’s culture never seems to stop.

Is It Time to Let Employees Work from Anywhere? — To quote Justin Garrison, “Yes.” Also, be ready to adjust salary expectations when you start trying to hire folks from anywhere.

What Does a Coder Do If They Can’t Type? — “I have been in pain for four years… He then kicked me out of his office for using the word ‘fucking’. ‘We do not tolerate cursing’, said a sign in the lobby.” Having to cope with a physical ailment or disability is bad enough. But, figuring out how to work while people literally won’t believe you when you say something’s wrong is a superhuman capability a few of us have.

How Smaller Cities Are Luring High-Tech Talent — Tech heavy metropolitan areas make up the landing places for an enormous amount of smart people. The states getting hit the hardest include Vermont, Delaware, Ohio, Michigan, and South Carolina among others. How do you beat this? It’s not only salaries and benefits.

25 Years at IBM! — Congrats to Phil Estes on 25 years at IBM. This is an amazing feat in our industry and should be celebrated.

Process

The Dark Side of DevOps (YouTube) — “People think that DevOps, Cloud Native, Agile, GROWS, etc. are all rainbows and roses. You start small, work your way up or you decide as an organizational unit to change. These are two patterns associated with a Jedi-type maturation process of DevOps. Like in Star Wars, DevOps has a dark side. This talk by Chris Short of Red Hat provides examples of successful and failed DevOps transformations, as well as some lessons learned along the way.”

Why our team canceled our move to microservices — It should not be a surprise to readers of this newsletter that microservices aren’t for everyone. When you have external dependencies that you can’t decouple easily; that monolith looks really nice.

AWS forbids partners even mentioning multi-cloud! — AWS asks its partners to say, “What other clouds are you even talking about? In the air?” AWS has told partners they shouldn’t use “terms like ‘multi-cloud,’ ‘cross cloud,’ ‘any cloud,’ ’every cloud,’ ‘or any other language that implies designing or supporting more than one cloud provider.’” Let me know how that works out.

Is it important to learn ITIL for a DevOps role? (/r/devops) — I think this is a very valid question. I learned ITIL before DevOps was a thing. Knowing what ITIL is, its intent, and its proper use as a guidebook and not edicts has been incredibly beneficial to me and my career. Should you know what ITIL is and how it works? Yes! If you intend to work in environments or industries that have used or are trying to move away from ITIL it helps to know what you’re up against.

Microsoft Screws Customers and its Own Advocates Alike — “Surprise! After Oct. 1, licenses you purchase for your Windows workloads become significantly more expensive to run in any cloud provider that isn’t Microsoft Azure. All of your budget planning, all of your resource forecasts? Throw them into the garbage and start over.” Or maybe this is a way to get people off Windows? 🤔🤔🤔

These Legit-Looking iPhone Lightning Cables Will Hijack Your Computer — To hell with your hardware and software supply chain. I just need to figure out where your IT department buys its cables from.

DevRel is a Force Multiplier
Featuring interviews with Developer Relations professionals from many successful companies including Red Hat, Google, Chef, Docker, Mozilla, SparkPost, Heroku, Twilio, CoreOS, and more, and with a foreword by Jono Bacon, The Business Value of Developer Relations is the perfect book for anyone who is working in the tech industry and wants to understand where DevRel is now and how to get involved. Don’t get left behind — join the community today. SPONSORED

Tools

BPF Performance Tools by Brendan Gregg (Amazon) — Pre-order The BPF version of Homer’s Odyssey today! Seriously, it’s 700 pages, y’all. I’m certain it’s worth every penny though.

schemahero/schemahero — A Kubernetes operator for declarative database schema management (GitOps for database schemas)

The dark side of kubeconfig — The contents of that .kube directory are WAY more important than a lot of people realize.

A brief history of Kubernetes, OpenShift, and IBM — A good history of the product I’m about to work on: OpenShift.

The Horror of Microsoft Teams — I bet it’s better than the affront to good vision, GSuite Hangouts that Red Hat has decided is the chat platform of choice for the company. I rarely use it and am in Slack most of the day with some IRC too. Most of the people I know that have been forced to use one product typically hate it. Give employees the flexibility to decouple their e-mail vendor from their chat vendor.

Building an auto-deployment pipeline using Jenkins and Ansible — “Here’s how one team used Ansible roles and Jenkins Pipeline to automate their Red Hat Virtualization for testing.”

Ansible Tower vs Ansible AWX for Automation — “Red Hat provides two tools for centralized Ansible management with a GUI tool. We will look at Ansible Tower vs Ansible AWX, use cases, cost, pros, and cons.”

Kubernetes Web UIs in 2019 — “This post takes a look at different open source Kubernetes web UIs, my requirements, and why I created Kubernetes Web View to help with support and troubleshooting across multiple clusters.”

CNCF Archives the rkt Project — Retiring projects is the sign of a healthy ecosystem. When we look back at what CoreOS did for containers and the early days of the cloud native ecosystem we’ll be quite thankful.

target/portauthority — API that leverages Clair to scan Container Registries and Kubernetes Clusters for vulnerabilities

vbatts/BuildSourceImage — Tool to build a source image based on an existing OCI image

Issif/falcosidekick — A simple daemon to help you with Falco’s outputs.

grampelberg/k8s-clusters — Simple Kubernetes clusters on cloud providers for development

alexlokshin/kube-entropy — Simplistic chaos engineering tool for Kubernetes application resilience testing

muesli/gitomatic — A tool to monitor git repositories and automatically pull & push changes

vmware/tern — Open Source compliance for containers

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week

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