073: DevOps Hiring Guide, RIP RTFM, BGP & DNS, Kubernetes, GitLab, and More

I had a lot going on this week. From dealing with bureaucracy at the second largest department of the US government to debugging Jinja2 code in Ansible playbooks to wrangling a toddler that isn’t feeling all that great to dealing with my constant nemesis; long thoracic nerve palsy and winging of the scapula. I have a lot on my plate all the time and I’m okay with that. I enjoy it most of the time. The trick to it all is balance. Like in DevOps, no one facet can take more of the time allocated to it than necessary. Sadly, that rarely works out and ends up creating debts. Managing the debt is the trick. I have the constant feeling of being behind on everything. But, if I can balance the figurative checkbook at the end of the week I’m okay with it. If your AWS bill is too high, too complex, or too horrifying to observe directly with the naked eye, talk to Last Week in AWS’s Corey Quinn. SPONSORED ...

April 29, 2018 · 5 min · Chris Short

072: Microsoft, Speaking, DevSecOps, Container Security, Kubernetes, and More

This week has been a blur. Monday through Wednesday, I was in Atlanta for DevOpsDays. DevOpsDays Atlanta was a truly great event. The theme was well thought out and the speakers were fantastic. This was the first time I actually manned a booth at an event before too. Talking to total strangers is something I’m okay with. It’s a good thing too because there were a ton of visitors to the SJ Technologies booth. My talk, DevOps is Not War, was on Wednesday. It was a brand new talk, with a brand new presentation tool, and the first time I used Google Slides. Testing in production as one member of the audience stated. I had the opportunity to iron out the kinks on Thursday in Ann Arbor at AWS Michigan where I gave my second talk in as many days, Heaven is Not a Cloud. Then on Friday, I demoed Kubernetes Cron Jobs to the Detroit Kubernetes, Docker & all related things Meetup. Needless to say, three new talks in three different cities over three consecutive days was a challenge. Could I do it again, yes. Would I voluntarily do it again? 🤔🤔🤪 ...

April 22, 2018 · 7 min · Chris Short

071: Susan Fowler, Open Offices, Tech Debt, Cloud Native Serverless, Kubernetes, and More

I am trying to figure out how best to describe my week. Maybe “frustrating”? There isn’t a much better word than that. When you have working code in one environment but not another because of backwardly applied security tooling, frustrated is all you can be. This isn’t some purposeful, subtle change to the environment. This is 1990s tech masquerading as security kabuki. And this code wasn’t rocket science, it was a unit test framework. When you hit roadblocks at every turn when you’re trying to rip through code to help a team accelerate; what do you do? Thankfully I have good bosses and clients that know they are in trouble if this continues. Now the work of fixing it is more of a job in patience than a level of effort. ReactiveOps — The Kubernetes Experts ReactiveOps provides DevOps expertise and best practices to help companies implement world-class, Kubernetes-based Infrastructure on AWS/GCP — then we maintain it. We instill confidence in a company’s application so that their engineers can focus on innovation that matters. SPONSORED ...

April 15, 2018 · 6 min · Chris Short

070: Not the Postmortem We Wanted to Run

Towards the end of my workday on Tuesday, tragedy struck the YouTube HQ in San Bruno, CA. A shooter made their way through a parking deck to a patio where people were eating and socializing. The shooter opened fire claiming three victims before turning the weapon on themselves. In Google’s Project Aristotle, psychological safety is identified as the number one contributor to “What makes a team effective at Google?” In the wake of this random act of violence, Google’s response might be the most watched handling of a workplace shooting. This is not the postmortem we want. But, this could be the postmortem we need. ReactiveOps — The Kubernetes Experts ReactiveOps provides DevOps expertise and best practices to help companies implement world-class, Kubernetes-based Infrastructure on AWS/GCP — then we maintain it. We instill confidence in a company’s application so that their engineers can focus on innovation that matters. SPONSORED Get early access to the all-new Tower Git client for Mac and Windows The best Git client for your Mac and PC now supports pull requests, interactive rebase and many powerful new features. Read more about the upcoming release and sign up here to get early access. SPONSORED ...

April 8, 2018 · 7 min · Chris Short

069: Kubernetes 1.10, Docker Deathwatch, Breaches, goo.gl Gone, Ansible, and More

What a big week for tech news! On Monday, the first Kubernetes release of 2018 dropped like the world’s hottest mixtape; Kubernetes 1.10 is out! On Wednesday, we saw what I believe to be the next step in Docker’s death; Solomon Hykes is out! More on that below. We also witnessed yet another big-time company get hit by WannaCry; Boeing. Boeing is the latest victim of poor IT practices as it found itself fighting the fast-spreading virus. Kudos to Boeing for getting it mitigated quickly but, this should never have happened given how old WannaCry is. Then on Thursday, 150 million of us found ourselves as a victim of yet another breach when MyFitnessPal announced its systems had been compromised. The MyFitnessPal breach compromised only superficial login data and passwords. No health or government issued data was stolen. Not to be outdone, Drupal core had a “Highly critical” RCE vulnerability. To top things off there appears to be a “skip containers, go serverless” drum beat building (more on that below). ...

April 1, 2018 · 6 min · Chris Short