Archives

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?” ...

This is the hell that is America today: It took us a week to get a legitimate COVID-19 test for my daughter. Strep and flu tests were done at the same time; she tested positive for the flu. Hopefully, things are on the upswing there. Just when that turned around for good, I went for a walk to take a break from the stressors of day to day life. Then out of nowhere, Sunny and I were attacked by an irresponsible neighbor’s dog. Immediately taking down the attacking dog resulted in me skinning and bruising my left knee. Then the neighbors didn’t want to take responsibility because we walked up the sidewalk. Can’t I walk up the sidewalk now? I don’t have time for stupid. I’ve never seen this dog before. I’ve lived in this neighborhood for three years. A neighbor that witnessed the whole thing confided in me that the same dog attacked his dog a while back and put it in the hospital. ...

My daughter just informed me she very likely has contracted COVID-19. My apologies but, I’m going to forgo my usual introduction in the newsletter this week. I was going to discuss this lengthy piece but, give it a read instead: The Developer-Led Landscape. 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 Kubernetes Contributors “It is intended to be the hub for all things related to the Kubernetes Contributor experience. Who exactly is a contributor? We all are - Whether you’re writing docs, reviewing code, participating in the community and its many [Special Interest Groups] SIGs, everyone is welcome. We hope this site will be a pathway to success for our 35000+ Kubernetes contributors, providing current, up-to-date information on community events, contributor resources, Kubernetes SIGs, and more.” One lone hero in production is not sustainable-not for you, not for high-functioning teams, and not for customers who depend on your service. Collaborate well by instrumenting observability from the very beginning, and enable more resilient teams to build more reliable systems sustainably. ...