DevOps'ish 260: Organizational skills a key to productivity, don't spy on employees, Elementary OS implosion, Dirty Pipe, big ole amplification attacks, GitOps galore, lavished by Linkerd, and more

We are very fortunate. I remind myself of that every day. Our household’s collective efforts have put us where we are today (being some random dude from a town called Hickory; this is far further than I’d ever imagined). I have been posting pictures from my new office that we custom built in our basement. I’m very fortunate to have a room, with a solid door and some soundproofing, to work from in these times. The only thing to bother me are the things I let into my day. It was funny, the other day, when I got a knock on the door and two of my nephews rolled in with Max and Julie. “Wow, Uncle Chris! I didn’t realize you were down here!” “Oh wow, Uncle Chris! I love your office!” Even the kids think it’s cool. Like I said, very fortunate. This weekend, I live tweeted cleaning out two bins FULL of cables. Lots of old memories brought up. All normal and some great memories. Now, I’m in a space that is just for me. Julie has a space just for herself as well. Both getting improved upon a little bit more every day. ...

March 13, 2022 · 7 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 259: Doctor induced roller coasters, Tessa Kriesel, NSA security guides, Kubernetes Hardening, GitOps & Flux, Get Vault Secrets into Kubernetes, and more

If you follow me on Twitter you know it has been a roller coaster week on the home front. I was getting a haircut today and a topic that I often hear lately is how terrible doctor’s are of late about informing folks of bad news. Our family went from thinking the absolute worst as laid out by doctors one afternoon. Only to have a doc twelve hours later tell us, no, everything is fine (Yay! 🥳). We’ll do this one test to prove it. We’re very confident this is a false positive. A friend of mine and I talk about this phenomenon from time to time. But, even my barber had a friend that had the news he had 4-6 years to live and the doctor said, “Yeah. You better start checking off that bucket list.” Why has this become common place? This somewhat inhuman behavior has to be being taught somehow for it to be so widespread one would think. I get it, telling people they might have to deal with the death of a loved one is hard. But, let’s rattle off all scenarios not just the death one. pat on the shoulder ...

March 5, 2022 · 8 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 258: Agile fails without psychological safety, Intel and Snyk acquire companies, Nvidia gets hit and punches back, GitOps with Flux, OrioleDB, and more

Rough week here on the home front. Rough week in other places too. Reach out if you’re struggling. DevOps’ish is brought to you our friends at Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED People Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises “Moral injury is experienced as a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations and that have the potential of harming others physically, psychologically, socially, or economically, and it could prompt people to leave a company.” This is an interesting take. Perfect example (potentially extreme) of this is me and Snowden. It bothered me for years. After years of therapy I can finally live with it all. Chris Lattner Formally Steps Down From Swift’s Core Team “Chris Lattner’s current day focus is serving as co-founder and CEO of Modular AI with seeking to overhaul the AI/ML infrastructure world.” ...

February 27, 2022 · 5 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 257: Kubernetes dockershim removal work, shades of DevOps, signal jamming is still illegal (in most places), CKA tips, PostgreSQL horrors, Kubernetes on a PS4, and more

I spent a lot of time working on the dockershim removal documentation effort. These docs are vitally important to our community. These updates often require some technical hands to get things figured out. First, many people have to be very specific and finite in their language with Docker and Kubernetes. Yes, it’s cringe-worthy how often you say anything potentially harmful about Docker, and people think, “the entire container ecosystem will collapse without the existence of this one company.” It shows how the learning paths to Kubernetes must be improved upon. Yes, you might need Docker Engine to get containers running on your Mac or Windows laptop. But, all the CRI implementations are containerd (or CRI-O) now when you get into production. containerd is a graduated CNCF project (and is the default CRI in Kubernetes), and CRI-O is an incubating project. If you notice, Docker, Docker Engine, and anything else with the word docker do not appear on the CNCF projects page. There’s a long story there. The internet shock and awe factory is real. It takes people with some battle hardening around the Docker topic to write some of these docs. ...

February 20, 2022 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 256: EARN IT Act is back and worse than ever, SSD chip contamination, technical debt, SBOMs, Tools for Securing Your Kubernetes Cluster, ValidKube, and more

I hope your week was wonderful, and you’re looking forward to the week ahead. I had the honor of being named a Continuous Delivery Foundation Ambassador this along (alongside the CNCF Ambassador title). Also, I began my official duties as a co-chair on the GitOps Working Group/OpenGitOps projects. “Why?!? Aren’t you busy enough???” One might understandably ask themselves. My GitOps partner in crime, Christian Hernandez, and I realized this odd alignment between GitOps and the organizations to help it grow. CNCF and CDF both have their hands in software delivery. We both applied with the premise of bridging and hopefully connecting the two foundations’ GitOps positioning. I look forward to participating in both communities equally under the GitOps umbrella. It’s going to be a fun ride. The CFP for GitOpsCon EU ends MONDAY at 11:59 PM PST. Submit your talks now!!! DevOps’ish is brought to you our friends at Honeycomb. “Stop Letting Complexity Slow You Down” Honeycomb makes it easy to understand and troubleshoot complex relationships within your distributed services. Solve problems faster. Ship reliable and performant features. SPONSORED ...

February 13, 2022 · 7 min · Chris Short