The ever-shifting sands of newsletter writing, these are the days of our DevOps’ish… There are no paying sponsors this week. It’s not a problem but, it is a little discouraging. The best part about being a disabled veteran is that I have a funding source for this newsletter until I decide to stop. But, this newsletter does take a significant amount of effort, time, and energy. It’s nice to be compensated for that. DevOps’ish Sponsorships are affordable and available in one-month increments. Send me a note with how long you want to sponsor and what you’re looking to achieve with your sponsorship. We can be awesome together!
Editor’s Note: The Short family is going on a vacation. DevOps’ish 150 will likely be a ‘best of’ issue (or maybe a beautiful postcard). If you have a preference or a better idea, let me know!
DevOps’ish Last Week’s Top Five
- 14 VSCode Extensions That Will Improve Your Productivity
- What are your red flags for job hunting (/r/devops)
- A beginner’s guide to network troubleshooting in Linux
- What’s the difference between a console, a terminal, and a shell?
- Tools That Make Work Faster
Events
Webinar: Building Kubernetes Operators in an Ansible-native way — Operators simplify management of complex applications on Kubernetes. They are usually written in Go and require expertise with the internals of Kubernetes. But, there’s an alternative with a lower barrier to entry. Ansible is a first-class citizen in the Operator SDK. Using Ansible frees up application engineers, maximizes time to automate and orchestrate your applications, and doing it across new & existing platforms with one simple language.
All Day DevOps, Live Online
November 6, 2019 (24 hours)
From your desktop, laptop, or mobile device
Free Registration
On November 6th, we will be supporting the live online All Day DevOps conference. This is a 24 hour event with 5 simultaneous tracks, delivering 125+ sessions in 38 time zones. Session tracks include Cloud Native Infra and Monitoring, DevSecOps and Automated Security, CI/CD, Site Reliability Engineering, and Cultural Transformation.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities in San Diego, California from November 18-21, 2019. Join Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, Fluentd, OpenTracing, gRPC, CNI, Jaeger, Notary, TUF, Vitess, NATS, Linkerd, Helm, Rook, Harbor, etcd, Open Policy Agent, CRI-O, and TiKV as the community gathers for four days to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Use code KCNACSN10 at checkout for a 10% discount on Corporate Registration.
People
Red Hat Jobs - Community Architect - Enablement in US Remote — Red Hat is looking for a Community Architect.
SysAdvent 2019 Author/Editor Signup — Have you ever wanted to get a big boost to your own brand while describing the work you’ve done? SysAdvent is the place to do it. I signed up to be an editor; give me something to edit!
AWS billing is broken and Kubernetes won’t last, says irreverent economist Corey Quinn — For a time longer than I want to admit, I thought the headline said irrelevant. I thought nothing of it because Corey would write a headline like that. “The most consistent mistake that everyone makes when using AWS—this extends to life as well—is once people learn something, they stop keeping current on that thing.” If you read this newsletter you’re doing yourself a tremendous service. Corey has an amazing AWS newsletter too.
Process
An update on Knative foundation status — Knative and Istio not being donated to a neutral third party is a little disconcerting. Like I was legit sad about it when I heard it. I don’t know if Google’s Open Source programs office has the wider cloud native ecosystem’s best interest at heart. But, I would welcome an alternative to the Linux Foundation to help the industry move forward faster too. Time will tell.
Docker is in deep trouble — “Docker has already raised $272.9 million, but the company hasn’t been profitable. It’s venture-capitalist supporters – ME Cloud Ventures, Benchmark, Coatue Management, Goldman Sachs, and Greylock Partners – which have seen it through Series E financing, can’t be happy, that after almost six-years, Docker still isn’t close to an IPO.”
How The NSA And U.S. Cyber Command Hacked ISIS’s Media Operation — This is an incredibly detailed account of a global cyber operation that was executed with extreme precision. It’s fascinating.
Testing in Production: the hard parts — “Two of the hardest problems of testing in production are curtailing blast radius and dealing with state. In this post, I aim to explore the topic of curtailing blast radius in more detail.”
Detecting Agile BS — “The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to DoD program executives and acquisition professionals on how to detect software projects that are really using agile development versus those that are simply waterfall or spiral development in agile clothing (“agile-scrum-fall”).”
Tools
New O’Reilly Resource Centers
Our editorial team has curated all the resources you need for a comprehensive overview of a specific topic or technology—whether you’re a beginner, expert, or somewhere in between. The new Resource Centers in the O’Reilly online learning platform cover topics like AI, Python, Java, data engineering, microservices, DevOps, and more.
Inside of Kubernetes Controller — Kenta Iso gives us a deep dive into Kubernetes Controllers.
Terraform at Starbucks: Infrastructure as Code for Software Engineers — “Learn the steps that Starbucks cloud engineering took in advancing their infrastructure as code capabilities to automate and simplify as much as possible for their engineers.”
Essential Tmux for CKAD or CKA Exam — “If you are preparing for CKAD or CKA exam and are new to Tmux (Terminal Multiplexer), this post will help you know everything that is essential to being productive with Vim during your exam.”
Ansible Crash Course — “If you’ve got servers to administrate, users to manage and software to deploy, then you’ll love Ansible. This Crash Course is for anyone new to Ansible and the concept of Configuration As Code.”
Ask HN: Anyone Using AWX Ansible in Production? — There are definitely people running AWX in production. There are so many little edge cases to solve as time goes on though. It’s definitely possible (just like most things are in tech). But, I do not recommend it. Look at how often that codebase changes and tell me you want to manage that at scale.
Intro to Ansible Tower — “Not sure whether you need Red Hat Ansible or Red Hat Ansible Tower? Read on, and learn how to get started with Ansible Tower as well.”
12 Kubernetes configuration best practices — If you’re running “vanilla” Kubernetes this is a must-read. Definitely a bookmarked web page for future reference.
PostgreSQL Change Data Capture With Debezium — “The most interesting aspect of Debezium is that at the core it is using Change Data Capture (CDC) to capture the data and push it into Kafka. The advantage of this is that the source database remains untouched in the sense that we don’t have to add triggers or log tables. This is a huge advantage as triggers and log tables degrade performance.”
kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git — Linus lets Lockdown land in Linux
VMware Tanzu — Cloud native open source from VMware
stefanprodan/gitops-app-distribution — GitOps workflow for managing app delivery on multiple clusters
facebookincubator/senpai — Senpai is an automated memory sizing tool for container applications.