020: Week of 1492920000

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. ...

April 23, 2017 · 4 min · Chris Short

019: Week of 1492315200

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. ...

April 16, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short

018: Week of 1491710400

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)_/¯ ...

April 9, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short

017: Week of 1491105600

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. ...

April 2, 2017 · 4 min · Chris Short

016: Week of 1490500800

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. ...

March 26, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short