DevOps'ish 205: Kubernetes Pod Security Policy Deprecation, open source skills are crucial, harms of large language models, Supermicro, water plant breach, VSCode repo FUD, and more

First off, Happy Valentine’s Day. I hope you’re enjoying it as best you can. This week I learned that an organization in the healthcare industry is working on a large project involving Kubernetes Pod Security Policies as a mainstay in their project. In case you haven’t heard, Pod Security Policies (PSPs) will begin the Kubernetes deprecation process in the 1.21 release. Kubernetes 1.21 releases on or about Thursday, April 8th, 2021. With PSPs being completely phased out by the 1.25 release (sometime in mid’ish 2022). When 1.21 is released, you’ll see a message similar to the following when touching PSPs, “The PodSecurityPolicy API is deprecated in 1.21, and will no longer be served starting in 1.25.” The Kubernetes Contributor Marketing Team is working on an official blog post, but it is taking longer than I’d prefer given the amount of PSP utilization that’s out there. I’m writing this here because I have worked in large banks, healthcare systems, and government agencies where changes like this could take quite some time to plan, test, verify, and implement. But, what is replacing PSPs? Well, that’s to be determined, which is equally terrifying to some. But, this is where folks have to have faith in the process. Sometimes we have to plan deprecation of something to force the community to respond to fill the gap. ...

February 14, 2021 · 8 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 204: Jassy's New Jam, KubeCon EU for $10, WFH? Wait for vaccine, GCP lost $5.6B in 2020, cloud shells compared, Well switch my qubits! and more

This week’s biggest stories (my opinion): Email from Jeff Bezos to employees Jassy in charge of the juggernaut come Q3. Deserted Island DevOps 2021: Call for Speakers/Papers @ Sessionize.com I gotta hype this event. It was a very well done event last year. KubeCon EU Registration Now Open $10 for a limited time. The Next Cyberattack Is Already Under Way A few nits, but otherwise accurate. People Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Walk “Walking is one of the simplest and most strategic things you can do for yourself. It takes little preparation, minimal effort, no special equipment, and it can contract or expand to fit the exact amount of time you have available. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a single bout of moderate-to vigorous activity (including walking) can improve our sleep, thinking, and learning, while reducing symptoms of anxiety.” Can confirm from multiple walks this week. Ephemeral Environments as a Service Do you find that your engineers spend too much time creating and maintaining staging environments and yet, there never seems to be enough environments to go around? A shortage of environments is a top driver of low developer productivity and often impacts an engineering team’s ability to ship features on time. With Release, you can get a full instance of your app with all of its services with every pull request. Your developers will never have to fight over staging environments again. Get started now. SPONSORED ...

February 7, 2021 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 203: Job hopping, Block Party, Perl.com pain, SSPL sucks, sudo vuln, cloud trends, the beauty of Windows 3.11, and more

We don’t talk about salaries in the US like people do in other countries. Apparently, we citizens of the United States are extremely conservative when it comes to this topic. I’d like to see that change in my lifetime. I sat down and looked at my W-2 like I do every year. A number hit me out of the blue. It proved to me job hopping works (to a point). From my first job out of the military to now, I’ve increased my salary by 3X. I’m not trying to brag at all. It’s a living testament that veterans are likely undervalued. Also, that they should take full advantage of their newfound job flexibility. When you look at my resume, since 2011, I’ve held 12 different positions. Each one was a pay raise, status boost, morality alignment, or open source work alignment. Then there was a transition from carrying a pager to not carrying one anymore. I’ve been at Red Hat for two and a half years. Today, my job is the best job I’ve ever had (and that is saying a lot). But, the two positions before joining Red Hat were only six-month stints with very legitimate reasons for leaving both. But, before that, a year at a great company. It shows that people are willing to work for great companies that align with their morals and ethos. Red Hat is a fantastic tech company with a wonderful culture. Every move to get here was worth it. Because it finally put my value and compensation in sync. It has made up for the previous nine years of not being able to put as much in a college or retirement fund. But, now that’s all possible. ...

January 31, 2021 · 7 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 202: AWS/Elastic drama, prioritize disability issues, ADT Peeping Tom, Software Is Your Competitive Advantage, Traefik to Caddy, No-Cost RHEL, serverless with Podman and more

Unpopular opinion alert (and Disclaimer)… Call me old fashioned, but I thought two of the top tenets of open source were candor and goodwill. I thought it was good practice to contribute to a project before baking it into a product. This was often the case for open source friendly vendors. But, it feels like AWS came along and never got that memo. I feel like AWS has done a lot more taking and productizing (aka making AWS a trillion-dollar, with a T, business) than contributing back to open source. They keep shooting themselves in the foot as they take more and more projects into their bevy of services. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet of a dev finding their code in the codebase of an AWS project without any credit being given, among other license violations. Someone at AWS said they’d look into it. But, consumption without credit incidents keeps happening (this wasn’t the first such incident I’d observed). There’s a culture problem, it seems. Then AWS hires a journalist to cover its open source work. I feel like that doesn’t help its case at all either. It acknowledges awareness of a problem. Pay for play is a negative thing in the radio business. It’s duplicitous at best in the tech industry. ...

January 24, 2021 · 7 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 201: Elastic's license problem, Dropbox layoffs, CISA recommending ad blockers, KubeLinter, kube-state-metrics, awesome-limits, folks fleeing for Signal & Telegram, and more

I lost a co-worker from the Ansible team this week. I’ve been struggling to get past the insanity of people younger than dying. 2021 is off to a real shit start. But, I think the biggest tech story of the week comes from Elastic. Keep reading for the details on Elastic’s idiocy. Here’s your weekly reminder that open source isn’t a business model, though. But, there’s been a moment of justice for those here in Michigan who were impacted by the Flint Water Crisis. Ex-Michigan governor indicted for ‘willful neglect’ in Flint water crisis. Here’s the grand jury indictment of Former Michigan Governor, Rick Snyder. The Judicial System better not mess this up. I also learned about the term Sealioning this week. I’ve seen it done before but did not know it had a definition that I could shut folks down with. Nice! Note: I’m looking for an intern this summer to help with OpenShift.tv (live streaming). If you know anyone that may be interested, please ask them to apply. If they have questions, feel free to send them my way (Twitter DMs, Telegram). Please apply ASAP as I’m already reviewing resumes this weekend. ...

January 17, 2021 · 7 min · Chris Short