Archives

Happy Easter! Hope you are enjoying your DevOps‘ing selves. I have family in from the northern reaches of the US. Trying to optimize time this week so no “monologue”; let’s get it! Department of Refreshment and Refurbishment Ex-Facebook engineers launch Honeycomb, a new tool for your debugging nightmares: Friend of DevOps’ish, Charity Majors, and her fellow team members have officially launched Honeycomb.io. Honeycomb.io is an impressive product. I ingested a week’s worth of nginx logs in seconds and had a beautiful dashboard up in running in as much time as it took to write this sentence. Dope! Ansible 2.3 has been released! This release appears to focus on bringing more advocates into the Ansible fold as it enhances Windows and networking capabilities. I welcome the additional features as a fully unified management platform for all components in an enterprise has never really panned out. OpenEBS 0.2 was released this week Kelsey Hightower has assembled an unofficial collection of tutorials and hacks for using Go with Google Cloud Functions. ...

I did so many different things this week! DevOps is really great and my role working between teams really brings me different challenges daily. Be it cultural or technical I am rarely doing the same thing hour-by-hour. Two things that did take a lot of my time this week were building new MySQL. database replicas (you know… state) and Mac server monitoring. Surprisingly, I maintain a Mac server or two for package building for one of our products. There are literally no “out of the box” monitoring solutions for Mac OS X anymore. This is equally unsurprising and indicative of how a platform that is used by so many in DevOps is not used for production workloads. There is nothing wrong with this; it is just odd to me monitoring a Mac is such a cumbersome task (no it’s not just FreeBSD). In the world of DevOps otherwise, it has been a pretty busy week. Let’s have a look! Department of Choice Concepts Naveen shared a great list of tools that make working with Kubernetes easier. This is a kind of must have list. For whatever reason, I cannot get tab completion working with kubectl. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ...

I started a new on-call rotation this week and it has really sucked. The team whose rotation I was added on to is mature in a few areas but monitoring and alerting seems to be lacking a little. They acknowledge that and my coming on to the rotation is partially to identify areas of improvement. The rotation I was on a couple weeks ago for a different team resulted in no pages all week and my bringing the team donuts. This week’s rotation has resulted in a page every night (and two shorter maintenance events). The team that got donuts is very weak in some areas that this week’s team is not. But the donut team focused on monitoring and alerting as well as not waking people up and it shows. Part of my job is to bring consistency to these teams that are separated 3,676 miles apart. Sharing expertise, processes, and procedures is part of the gig. The deficiencies in tooling have been identified. The need for personnel has been fulfilled. Now it’s time to bring on the processes and results. ...

Last Sunday, shortly after DevOps’ish Weekly 015 went out, Nicole Forsgren of DORA reached out on Twitter to demonstrate how easy it is to find great people in DevOps. This is Nicole’s list of great folks out there DevOps’ing: Alexa Alley Alice Goldfuss Amy Nguyen Amye Scavarda Aruna Ravichandran Ashley McNamara Betsy Beyer Bridget Kromhout Caitie McCaffrey Camille Fournier Cat Posey Charity Majors Courtney Kissler Courtney Nash Dinah McNutt Dominica DeGrandis Heather Mickman Heidi Waterhouse Ines Hegedus-Garcia Ines Sombra Jennifer Davis Jessica DeVita Jessica Hilt Jessie Frazelle Katherine Daniels Laine Campbell Lara Hogan Lisa Phillips Mandi Walls Megan Anctil Nell Shamrell Pamela Howell Phoenix Johnson Rikki Endsley Susan Fowler Rigetti Tuuli Bell Zee Alexander unpixie If Nicole Forsgren can bust out 38 awesome people DevOps’ing surely you can come up with ten. Share your ten awesome folks of #DevOps with me on Twitter. Nicole also started a “Ladies in #DevOps” trend in the process of sharing this list. Show people respect where it is due. Department of Choice Concepts Jacob Hoffman-Andrews was on The Changelog recently discussing Let’s Encrypt. It is a fairly journey through the birth of one of the most important projects of the last couple of years. ...

I have recently taken over as a co-organizer of Triangle DevOps. In a meeting with the other primary co-organizer we talked a little about performance. DevOps considers network, code, system, and other aspects of performance. Yet, we rarely, if ever, consider what we can do to help the most critical part of our products; the front end. The customer cares the most about the interface they use for the products we facilitate. If we do not consider caching, CDNs, and asset utilization at some point in our journey are we doing DevOps justice? I would argue it’s not the job of development or design to consider global optimizations such as this. Don’t get me wrong, it would be awesome if someone else cared but so often it is not even a thought. This is a part of what DevOps is all about! Optimization, reduce costs, and gain efficiencies. DevOps is everything and everything is DevOps. Department of Choice Concepts Speaking of front end performance, Google just announced Guetzli. It can create high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller. ...