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Trying something different this week and sending out the newsletter on Saturday. Hit Reply and Let me know what you think. The big news this week is Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation, provides a very positive and principled take on the GitHub acquisition. I have been a believer in Microsoft’s commitment to open source ever since they reached out to me to discuss how they can improve their image in the open source community. Microsoft is apologizing for the Ballmer years profusely with actions (not just words). But, I wonder if Microsoft is buying open source “cool points” too fast? The initial reaction to the acquisition from folks that didn’t work at either company was generally negative. When I discussed how far Microsoft has come back in April, the reaction was also negative. The comments harkened back to an old Microsoft adage, “Embrace, extend, and extinguish.” I understand peoples’ distrust. However, it has been three years since Microsoft took the keynote stage at All Things Open 2015 to talk about how much they love Linux. They are doing everything right so far. It’s time to start taking Microsoft’s word (we’re not at war). They are going to be good stewards of the open source communities they manage. ...

My whirlwind speaking tour continued at DevOpsDays Toronto this week. The tour continues at DevNation Federal in Washington DC on Tuesday. The event is free to all so come out and say, “Hi.” I’ll also be at DevOpsDays DC. Stop by the SJ Technologies booth and talk some DevOps or Kubernetes if you’re around. 5 considerations for continuous delivery of microservices Continuous Delivery is an essential component of any software delivery practice, including microservices. This new blog series shares five considerations we recommend keeping in mind when designing a CD workflow on microservices architectures. SPONSORED Events DevNation Federal Date: 2018-06-05 Join us to learn about the revolutions happening in communities around containers, data, and application modernization. This is an opportunity for you to hear how visionary teams in the federal government are innovating with open source, and hear from leaders in the private sector doing the same. Chaos Conf Date: 2018-09-28 Chaos Conf looks super awesome. Opening the event will be Adrian Cockcroft, VP AWS, who called 2018 “The year of #chaosengineering”. Closing out the night will be Jessie Frazelle, one of the top #containers experts on the planet currently at Microsoft. ...

I have a lot to talk about this week. I’m putting sections in the introduction for ease of reading (feel free to skip parts you’re not mildly interested in). Also, thank you to this week’s sponsors; Replicated and GoCD! ChefConf 2018 The highlight of my week was being able to meet 1,400 new friends at ChefConf 2018 in Chicago. If you are ever wondering how to run an amazing event, look no further than the good folks at Chef. From a speaker’s perspective, I have never felt more prepared for a talk. The event itself was meticulously planned and executed. I presented my talk, DevOps is Not War to a standing room only audience. Thanks to the fantastic guidance from the conference’s speaking coach, Anna Boynton, I was able to take a forty minute talk and land it perfectly inside the twenty-minute time slot I had. The event morphed my bias of Chef from a niche tool to a formidable accompaniment of software to ease automation tasks. The messages from the keynotes were like those I’ve delivered to many audiences before, “You’re not an X company, you’re a technology company.” I highly recommend adding ChefConf 2019 to your schedules as soon as it is announced. ...

This has been a whirlwind week. On Sunday, we celebrated Mother’s Day. It was a good day where I tried very hard to give Julie the day off from the rigors of Max management. I had to bail a little before Max’s bedtime though to head to Cleveland for an SJ Technologies client visit. It was a great visit but it was, in military lingo, a turn and burn. I was back in Michigan by Monday night. I was working on a couple of tickets this week before heading off to ChefConf. One issue revealed a lovely little bug in Kubernetes (login required). I was attempting to mount a ConfigMap as a file in the root directory of a container and it was not working no matter what. It was awful and the workaround was thankfully easy enough due to the fact it was a web app and Caddy was available. I created an HTTP redirect and I was off and running. I submitted some additional bug reports where appropriate and was off to the next thing. Tripping over bugs is annoying. But, there’s a great Kubernetes community right here in Michigan: Orchestructure. Thanks to y’all for helping me out this week. ...

Assholes seemed to be the theme of the week. First, Rafael Avila de Espindola is leaving the LLVM project because it adopted a code of conduct and its support of Outreachy. Yes, Rafael is arguing that creating a framework to foster a more inclusive community and helping folks that have are at a significant disadvantage is against his “ethical views”. Next, infamous bad actor, Richard Stallman, vehemently opposed the removal of an abortion joke from glibc source code. The basis for the opposition? “The fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this.” Because a GNU manual isn’t meant to be a “safe space” according to Stallman. Finally, Josh Pigford suggested that changing jobs every 12-18 months was a red flag for hiring. When numerous people called bullshit, Josh continually doubled-down even after someone pointed out Josh had ten jobs in a ten-year span. Instead of apologizing or better explaining his statement Josh hid behind the fact the responses to his comments were overwhelming and decided to “not look at Twitter for a few days” as a result. In my opinion, changing jobs every twelve to eighteen months shows you have a significant ability to learn and adapt. You will also have a significant experience advantage over someone who coasted somewhere for years because it was “comfortable”. All of these assholes were nice enough to self-identify. Make sure you remember who they are should you ever cross paths with them. The moral of the story is, we all need to be excellent to each other and helpful to everyone. If you are somehow against that for some reason then maybe you’re in the wrong line of existence. ...