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North Carolina, and particularly the Triangle area, has had an enormous amount of rain this week. The tiny creek behind our house was a rapid early in the week. According to the USGS, Falls Lake is almost ten feet above it’s average levels. There was one fatality as a result of someone driving around a barricade onto a flooded roadway. Common sense is not common. Please stay safe out there, folks. Meanwhile, back on the DevOps ranch, it was a VERY busy week. I’m on-call for two products this week, working on three projects, writing an article inspired by my VP, submitting CFPs, and trying to keep up with the news. With so much going on let’s get to the DevOps’ish! Department of Choice Concepts Boot an OpenSSH server in 10 mins with LinuxKit: Hands-on guide to use Docker’s LinuxKit to build, run and connect to a bootable Linux system image with OpenSSH. Julia Evans wrote about her favorite shell this week. I just setup fish shell after re-reading Julia’s article. Install, add to /etc/shells, and you’re off and running. Out of the box it’s REALLY awesome. ...

Not quite sure what Docker is doing? Few people are. Docker is still Docker except when it’s Moby. Moby is open source and Docker isn’t (kind of). According to the official Moby Project announcement, Moby Project is NEW! But, Moby Project is actually the new upstream for the Docker project. Interestingly enough, the Moby Project exists to create “An open framework to assemble specialized container systems without reinventing the wheel.” (Emphasis added.) The best analysis of the whole S.N.A.F.U. fittingly comes from The Register. I used Comic Sans in the above image because this is a PR fustercluck. The worst part of the announcement was that it was timed REALLY poorly (or not at all). I learned of it when I click a GitHub issue for Docker and it took me to github.com/moby/moby/issues/4717. I legitimately thought something was horribly wrong with GitHub. Nope! All the branding shenanigans appeared to happen all at once during DockerCon. Containers are hard to explain to people because containers aren’t really a thing. Linux containers are a combination of pre-existing Linux kernel components. The Founder of Docker, Solomon Hykes, tweeted out two sketches to explain the Moby Project. The fact that this was necessary shows how awkward this is to explain. Now, the container waters are even muddier than they already were by this rough re-branding effort. ...

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. ...