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As written for my website, a version of which is also here. I woke Sunday morning to some very sad news. We’ve had a tragic loss in the cloud native community. Last weekend we lost Dan Kohn. Dan Kohn is the former Executive Director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation and was leading up COVID-19 response for the Linux Foundation. He passed away after losing his battle with stage four colon cancer. Dan’s passing happened far too soon. I knew Dan was battling something, but we hadn’t been in the same place for quite some time. It’s not one of those things you necessarily want to initiate a conversation about either. I did not know of Dan’s blog about it until he was gone. I would encourage all of us to look at our physical ailments as we age (perhaps more rapidly because of 2020) to take care of ourselves. To Dan’s family and his kids, we are here. I’m very sorry for your loss. Our condolences go out to you on behalf of the cloud native community. We are very sorry, and we’re here to let you know that we will be there as you need us. Please do not hesitate to reach out, reach out to me if you need anything at all. ...

Want to see your organization in DevOps’ish? Review the newsletter sponsor page for all the details. Give the DevOps’ish Sponsorship Prospectus a gander if you need help convincing your marketing team they should spend. SPONSORED DevOps’ish is brought to you by Accurics. They’re cool people doing cool things with cloud native security. Check them out! Scanning Kubernetes IaC configurations with Terrascan People The 2020 Last Week in AWS Charity T-Shirt: Route53 I always love it when people ask if I know Corey Quinn. Yes, we’re friends on two different sides of the country (we have the technology, it is possible). Our kids played piano together last year on our family trip to San Francisco and Yosemite. I bought Max the San Francisco LEGO set for his birthday this week because that trip made such an impact on him as a person. The Quinn Family played a huge part of that. Corey is on my incredibly short Christmas card list. When my friends are trying to do good in the world I like to highlight that. Please, buy a t-shirt, tack on an extra $10 if you can, and support an amazing cause in 826 National. ...

I was incredibly busy this week. I spoke at the October 2020 CNCF Eastern Canadian Meetup. I turned the introduction to last week’s newsletter into its own blog post, Fear and Loathing in YAML, and it made the front page of the orange site (you read it here first). And then, of course, all the live streaming for Red Hat. Speaking of live streaming. When we look back at 2020, it seems like live streaming will be the thing the COVID-19 brought into our daily lives. Twitch is cleaning up its act and trying to be a little more grown up: Twitch DMCA Purge Deletes Thousands Of Streamers’ Videos. Then a major US politician got up to 400K people viewing her stream simultaneously. It seems like, live streaming, in general, is turning into the new Twitter. It’s an exciting world, for sure. I need to sit down and write out some additional thoughts on live streaming, my setup, etc. But that’ll be for another day. DevOps’ish is brought to you by Accurics. They’re cool people doing cool things with cloud native security. Check them out! Scanning Kubernetes IaC configurations with Terrascan ...

We kinda went down a rabbit hole this week when I suggested folks check out yq, “The aim of the project is to be the jq or sed of yaml files.” First, there’s nothing wrong with this project. I like it, I find the tool useful, and that’s that. But the great debate started over our lord and savior, YAML. Yeah, I know, XML vs. JSON vs. YAML vs. TOML vs. the next thing is a tired and old debate. Let me level set here. I routinely joke about how I’m a “Calendar Driven YAML Engineer” and have been for years on openshift.tv. But I’m not too fond of YAML. Let me tell you a story… In 2012, I worked at McClatchy Interactive (before the really dark times) and enjoyed the systems and security work I was doing. We had our machine creation down to a finite science. Bare metal spun up, you punched the MAC address into a database file, and off the machine went to get all the needed packaging and code to run as its defined purpose in our infrastructure. ...

Normally, I don’t like to highlight military uses of Kubernetes (people have feelings about that; I do too, for that matter). But, this week, something rather significant happened out in Utah: U-2 Federal Lab achieves flight with Kubernetes. “The U-2 Federal Laboratory successfully leveraged Kubernetes during a local training sortie on a U-2 Dragon Lady assigned to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base, Sept. 22. This represents the first time Kubernetes has flown on an operational major weapon system in the Department of Defense.” Yes, OpenShift and Kubernetes are in use in ground systems across the US Department of Defense. But, I’ve not heard of Kubernetes running on actual airframes until this week. The fact the team on the U-2 did this is quite stunning. Remember, U-2s were critical intelligence gathering sources on overflight missions during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. The U-2 program is a very old and sensitive program to the US government. As high and overarching as my clearances were, I never got close to the U-2 program (compartmentalization works). The U-2 is a critical C4ISR platform used in humanitarian and war fighting missions the globe over. The fact the U-2 program is leaning forward with containers and cloud native thinking makes me ask the same question I asked folks about DevOps and the US nuclear weapons program. “If they can do it, why can’t you?” ...