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This week I heard about and witnessed some pretty disgusting behavior in the greater cloud native community. First, I saw a tweet from a CNCF Ambassador saying KubeCon was pay to play (the tweet is gone now but, you better believe they lost a follower that day). If KubeCon were pay to play, I’d have spoken at the last three years of KubeCons. Red Hat spends a shitload of money sponsoring KubeCon and the Linux Foundation. It does not, nor should it ever influence the talk selection process. Next, I heard firsthand about people jumping into KubeCon track committee members’ DMs and chastising them for not selecting their talk. I won’t be naming and shaming. They’ve done that for themselves. But, I can guarantee you, this is not how you want to make a name for yourself in the community. Oh… Some random Google software engineer got blocked because they did not understand any word I wrote. Then proceeded to put words into my mouth about how the selection process works. At some point in the process, a deciding factor in the talk selection process could be looking for a submitter’s online presence (yes, speaker names get Googled routinely). The submission process does involve some links to social media and/or GitHub, for example, if memory serves me right. Building a KubeCon track is a super laborious process that you have to dedicate serious time to in a brief time window. IT’S HARD WORK. ...

DevOps’ish is in a state of spring cleaning. First, I’ve found a tool that I like more than Pocket to bookmark and save pages in Raindrop.io. All the Recommended Reads automation is now pulling from Raindrop.io. Then three Zapier rules ferry everything off to the appropriate places. I made that transition midweek. Next is the newsletter service itself. I’ve been unhappy with the current provider ever since doing the never-easy switch from Mailchimp (how forward-thinking that was) to the current provider. I’ve had more tickets opened than newsletters sent; enough was enough. Last week, I discovered EmailOctopus. I have been researching it in my spare time. Yesterday was a day off for me, so I started the switch to making DevOps’ish a Google Workplace domain and use EmailOctopus to send newsletters. It takes a lot more work than it should to get and send an email than it used to, but it’ll be worth it. The DevOps’ish Solarwinds supply chain compromise Index has many updates this week. Including the former Solarwinds CEO blaming an intern for the mistake and a congressional hearing on the matter. ...

Sometimes you don’t know what the world needs until someone tells you. On Monday this week, a friend asked if I had any additional books to point them to for Kubernetes help. I have a mile-long list in my head. I said, yeah, let me punch that up for you real quick. But, instead of creating a locked down doc or dust bin email, I built a website. Behold, Kubernetes README. It’s nothing really fancy. A copy of an existing site, with a different name, and data to help folks make a selection that fits their needs. But, this is the beauty of working in an open source environment. I didn’t even think of typing them an email. It was going to be a website the second the ask came in. There was no reason to go to the effort of creating a list of books that would live in a vacuum. Sharing knowledge helps us all. It’s how folks can figure out how to grow on their own. Thanks for the idea, Justin. I hope it helps. ...

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. ...

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 ...