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Have you ever felt like you’re snakebit? When whatever you do in a particular discipline, nothing goes as planned. I have a Dell R820 packed to the gills with 500 GB Samsung SSDs (I’ll update to 1 TB drives once they’re under $100) in my lab. 1.3 terabytes of RAID10 at your service. If you’ve followed me since my Red Hat days, you’ve seen me wrangle with Kubernetes local storage on this box. I’ve destroyed this server live on air, on purpose, more than I want to admit. After joining AWS, I didn’t need an OpenShift cluster and completely wiped the server. It sat there completely off for weeks at a time. The entire month of June, it sat off. I didn’t use the server for much after October, aside from the random tasks that were I/O heavy. I’m focused on inner loop development in my new role at AWS. The pipeline to prod experience from there, while not necessarily in scope, that interface, that handoff, that experience, has to be solid. Also, the job will vary day-to-day as I’m the first Developer Advocate on this team. One day I might be building software from source one day. Next, I could be looking at a CI pipeline. Another day, I’ll be creating and spinning up many containers at once. There’s also this cool new thing for bare metal called EKS Anywhere (I had my feedback put into the product). It’s open source, too; I don’t need a license as long as I’m not calling support for it. ...

Independence Day Happy Independence Day to my friends and family in the United States. I have a lot of mixed feelings on this day. But, we should note that independence is hard-won. The United States declared its independence in 1776. But, it took eight years of war and bringing in two British enemies (Spain and France) in the process. What has followed is one of the best examples of enemies turned BFFs in our world today (it did take time, though). There’s much to be gleaned here about creating allies out of opponents. It is often necessary when going through any transformation. Your detractors, once convinced, can become your biggest allies. If this piqued your interest, check out my talk, DevOps is Not War. I Made Some Shinies I’ve been busy the past few weeks. I often have or create side projects on which I want to spend time while traveling. You might remember I was at Open Source Summit last month. During the week of Open Source Summit, my side project was to build out my ultimate development environment: code-server, Caddy, Tailscale, and Hugo. It was super helpful to be able to ping the fine folks in the Coder booth when I had questions walking in or out of the venue that day. I call it “[W]onderful, like unicorns and rainbows, y’all. 🦄🌈🦄🌈🦄🌈” It is where newsletters, blog posts, landing pages (I need to write a blog post on that), and all the YAMLs are being created these days (public repos only for obvious reasons). ...

This week I was in Austin, Texas (where it was hotter than the hinges of hell) at Open Source Summit. I staffed the AWS booth, attended a few talks, met with friends I hadn’t seen in long, and became generally reinvigorated about open source. It’s my last event on the Amazon EKS team. I’m moving inside the Containers organization at AWS to work on a new and different project. AWS was a leading sponsor. I had great conversations with folks. Undergrads, customers, partners, and others had questions about Kubernetes, EKS, or GitOps. I gave a booth demo on Multi-Cluster GitOps, a solution we intend to open source soon. I was impressed by quite a few sponsors there. Camunda, Coder (thanks for the Caddy config), KubeCost, Solo, and Capital One all had great presences at the conference. But two newer companies melted my brain with how excellent their products were: Fermyon and Clockwork. Fermyon ventured out to start a company for all you WebAssembly fans (closet fan, still need to learn it). Fermyon is making a batteries included WebAssembly platform. I feel Fermyon will soon make its way into the mainstream WebAssembly developers’ workflows. My friend Michelle Dhanani and others from Microsoft are there, so I’m certain they’ll be doing some fantastic things. Be sure to checkout their spin repo in the Tools section. ...

I’ll be at Open Source Summit this week in Austin. If you see me, stop me and say hello. Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” This might seem natural but think about the different ways we communicate now. E-mail, text messages, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc. are all communication tools that serve various purposes. But, in GitOps, whether you design around a good developer experience (using git as the only interface) or design around a minimalistic amount of tooling (one secret management solution), that tooling has to fit within Conway’s Law usually. For example, if you want to use an existing tool with GitOps, that’s entirely possible. But, that tool, let’s say a key management system (KMS), has rules of its use, and automating them will need you to build a system that can interface well with the team that runs that system. If you’re lucky, you can run your Vault in your namespace and minimize handoffs. This is the only way to escape Conway’s Law in GitOps. Decoupling the entire system from the rest of the org. Bring everything you need as a team to the platform, and running it all yourself will minimize the communication lanes, but I doubt it will reduce your system’s footprint. ...

I’ve written this newsletter from a lot of places over a variety of internet services. From the WiFi at home, to airplanes, to airport lounges, hotels, AirBnBs, VRBOs, foreign countries, and more, I’ve written DevOps’ish many different places and ways. But, today is unique because I’m the way off the beaten path in northern Michigan. We’re so far off the beaten track that there’s no cell service. There is WiFi from Viasat. I’ll say it’ll get the job done, but I’m reminded of working at low data rates in far-flung places decades ago. But, I think the view from this one is much better than the others. Oh and this was my most popular tweet this week. O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb! Manage complex cloud-native systems, improve customer experiences, and build & run better software using Honeycomb. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts. ...