DevOps'ish 226: Kubernetes non-code contributions, don't ban politics at work, engineers waste 1 day a week on technical debt, CentOS Stream is working out, and more

If you follow me on Twitter you know I’ve had a hard time with stable internet this week. Co-workers asking about my absence, I appreciate you. Sorry, y’all, sometimes everything breaks at once. But then today I get this when working on something newsletter related. Y’all… I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. Then it got worse. I won’t go into details but, let’s just say it was the cherry on top of a shit week for tech but otherwise good week here at home. [] People How to choose a SIG as a non-code Kubernetes contributor “To join the Kubernetes community, I recommend finding a SIG where your skills align, doing things you want to do in your off time. There’s a list of Kubernetes SIGs with a lot of great options. If you’re not sure where to go, start with Contributor Experience. We’re here to help.” LaunchDarkly Named a Leader in Feature Management and Experimentation Discover why in its first Wave report dedicated to Feature Management And Experimentation, Forrester rates LaunchDarkly’s platform a Leader among vendor features that enable development teams to reduce software release headaches and enable true testing in production. Download today! SPONSORED ...

July 11, 2021 · 6 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 225: AWS Infinidash, GPT-3 via GitHub Copilot, Polywork, rainbow marketing, LinkedIn breach, VMs hiding ransomware, Kubernetes overspend, Helm, GitOps, Tailscale with Kubernetes, and more

“AWS Infinidash is a new networking technology that is being introduced to the AWS cloud. This technology is being used by AWS to provide a new networking model that is more efficient and more scalable than the current networking model.” —GPT-3 GPT-3 generated that statement about AWS Infinidash thanks to GitHub Copilot. I’m also using GitHub Codespaces through VSCode and the web to write this week’s newsletter. I’ll probably have a write-up on these new tools in the near future. Thank you, GitHub, for access to these tools early. But, back to the point: AWS Infinidash. It’s not real! It’s complete hogwash, and you shouldn’t feel bad if you didn’t know that. The fake AWS Infinidash service highlights the veracity of a joke gone wrong on an industry scale as it has (there’s a Rust library for it). AWS was the innocent victim of the prank, too. But, instead, it’s humans that are taking the blowback. People are dunking on other people on Twitter for not being “in” on the joke. Recruiters are getting shamed for asking for five years experience in a technology that doesn’t exist. But, according to GPT-3, it does. If they were using GPT-3, they’d be reinforced in this thinking. ...

July 4, 2021 · 10 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 224: Take your time off, Bryan Liles on a mission, John McAfee dead, Dell SupportAssist assisting the wrong people, AWS DNS hijack, Istio 1.10, Intel to make RISC-V chips, and more

Let me be someone to remind you to take some time off (if you can). As a family, we had many lessons learned from not being in our daily routines, setting, or location. This whole month has been a lot of optimizations in our household. All these learned from being outside our sixteen-month grooves. For example, I confirmed I needed glasses after a persistent headache went away then came back when I went back to work. Time off is healthy. Do it (again, if you can or as soon as you’re able). Go to another part of your state/country and do something different. You’ve earned it. You made it through some of the earth’s darker days. Tell your people Chris Short said so. A few friends have come through Michigan lately. I invite you to fall through if you’re able to safely. A surprising concentration of Kubernetes contributors lives here. We all seem to have a desire to show off this wonderland of ours. Case in point, I’ll see you soon, Pop. ...

June 27, 2021 · 5 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 223: Hostile AWS Free Tier, Bye bye Bezos, InfoSec competencies, Rust in Linux Kernel, Git for Computer Scientists, secrets on the CLI, and more

In vacation mode this week. News reading played second fiddle to having fun. People AWS pricing problems could deter new cloud engineers I was quoted in this piece. I take the same opinion that the AWS Free Tier is indeed user hostile. Not because it’s limited in weird ways but, because new users could be billed thousands and before they know it, it’s too late. Take a deep dive into observability at o11ycon+hnycon, a two-day virtual conference on the future of shipping software. Happening June 9-10, this highly interactive event connects you and your peers to explore cutting-edge capabilities and unique outcomes that define observability. You’ll also hear from top Honeycomb customers and observability experts– including Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist of The Duckbill Group, and Nora Jones, CEO of Jeli! Guess less and know more with Honeycomb SPONSORED. Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs I don’t blame anyone for pursuing jobs that fit better to their lifestyle. I also realize a 40% is a tectonic shift in the workforce. If this holds true, we’re all going to be impacted in some way. ...

June 20, 2021 · 4 min · Chris Short

DevOps'ish 222: Industry under pressure, Holy $%^& I agree with Torvalds, US Congress begins assault on big tech, polkit vuln, ALPACA, How To Love Kubernetes and Not Wreck The Planet, and more

I want to point out a few signs that I think we’re pushing the industry too hard, too fast. Fires in AWS data centers, Fastly (the CDN) took an hour-long outage triggered by a customer finding a bug, Cloudflare had outages in Chicago and Los Angeles. Ransomware is running through companies like Grant went through Richmond (to the point the US Justice department is equating them, in some ways, to terrorist attacks). Things need to change. Moving towards a more hybrid and fluid environment is not just a strategic priority; it’s survival at this point. Then making sure that your entire business can’t grind to a halt because lowest common denominator security issues happen. I thought we figured it out in the early 2000s. But, technology has changed so much since then, and there are new zero-days every day. We’re in a very tight position as technologists. If you’re a developer, you’re a target. If you’re an employee, you’re a target. You and every service you touch is a target. Nothing is safe. ...

June 13, 2021 · 5 min · Chris Short