I had the pleasure to travel to our South Florida office this week. I participated in five quarterly planning meetings and Bankrate’s 2nd Hackathon. The quarterly planning meetings were pretty cool. It was interesting to see what all our dev teams were going to be pushing forward with for the year. But, the highlight of the week was the Hackathon. There were some incredibly creative ideas built around the Bankrate platform that I’m sure a few will be brought into our products soon. I had the modest goal of standing up a Kubernetes cluster in AWS and deploying an example app to it. Luckily I had enough support from our team of Phippineers to make it happen. Phippineers you ask? Several members of the team have only heard me talk about Kubernetes. The first thing I asked the team to do was to watch The Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes to get an idea of the concepts at play. In the guide, a cute little giraffe named Phippy represents a PHP app looking for a home. The team latched on to this and off we went using Terraform to roll out CoreOS Tectonic to AWS. There were some bumps along the way and at one point I was almost ready to throw in the towel. But, with some help from various CoreOS folks on Twitter we got everything up and running. One of the devs on the team set out assembling a Laravel app to be deployed to the cluster. They marveled at the ability to roll out multiple versions of the app, scale up the whole cluster, and scale it back down by editing a variable here or there. It was an awesome experience! My team didn’t win any prizes or accolades but we definitely took a huge leap towards our future infrastructure. ...

Is your organization a learning organization? Do you, your team, your leadership, and your company learn from mistakes? Do you share knowledge and lessons learned as widely as humanly possible? These are all question you should be asking yourself along your journey. If your maintenance windows are no holds bar with no rollback plan, that’s a problem. If you are not doing something to share new technologies with your team on a regular basis you’re going to have a bad time. Continuous learning is such a critical aspect of DevOps and working in tech that you must reinforce it at every possible opportunity. I’ll be in South Florida this week hopefully doing some continuous learning. You can’t buy DevOps, but you may have to sell it — GoCD This new blog series aims to help DevOps leaders in organization get stakeholder buy-in. It covers approaches to talking about why, as well as specific things you can do to sell your ideas. SPONSORED ...

Build versus Buy? It’s a question I usually asks candidates during interviews. There is really only one good answer; buy until you can build it better for cheaper. This doesn’t mean outsource everything. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hacking together cool things. It means that you have the business sense to know that you have core competencies that are either still forming, your team is small, or you have enough to manage in-house already. Sure, everyone wants to build everything they use. You get better by building, your team takes pride in building, but at some point, you build yourself into a box. Then what? Then you buy your way out of it at what is likely a higher cost to your business than buying at the beginning. Remember, your technical debt started the second you released code. Free continuous delivery eBook from GoCD This free reference guide will take you back to the basics. You’ll find visuals and definitions on key concepts and questions you need to answer about your teams to determine your readiness for continuous delivery. Download and share with your team. SPONSORED ...

Free continuous delivery eBook from GoCD This free reference guide will take you back to the basics. You’ll find visuals and definitions on key concepts and questions you need to answer about your teams to determine your readiness for continuous delivery. Download and share with your team. SPONSORED All Things Open 2017 October 23 and 24, Raleigh, NC USA 2,500–3,000+ technologists will descend upon the City of Oaks to attend 200+ sessions from nearly as many speakers. Representative from nearly every major technology company in the U.S. will be in attendance as well. To get 20% off enter code DevOpsish20 when registering to attend. Website: https://allthingsopen.org To Register: https://allthingsopen.org/register-now All Day DevOps, Live Online October 24, 2017 When: October 24, 2017 (24 hours) Where: From your desktop, laptop, or mobile device Free Registration: All Day DevOps Registration (http://www.alldaydevops.com) On October 24th, DevOps’ish will be supporting the Live Online All Day DevOps Conference. This is a 24-hour event with 5 simultaneous tracks, delivering 96 sessions and 4 keynotes in 38 time zones. Session tracks include Automated Security, CI/CD, Modern Infrastructure, DevOps in Government, and the Tech Crawl, where companies will take you behind the scenes of their DevOps working environments. ...

This week I finished a project that has been in the works for a quite some time. Back before I moved to Detroit but shortly after taking over Triangle DevOps, I was offered (and accepted) a spot as a DevOpsDays Raleigh organizer. I submitted three talks to the event and one was accepted. Today I opened the event with my talk, “The Dark Side of DevOps” and thoroughly enjoyed it as well as all the other talks at the event. Huge shout out to the other organizers, volunteers, and speakers for all their hard work in making the second DevOpsDays Raleigh better than the first one. It was great to catch up with friends while I was in town. Back to Detroit for me but what a week for news in general and DevOps! GoCD — open source continuous delivery server GoCD is a continuous delivery tool specializing in advanced workflow modeling and dependency management. It lets you track a change from commit to deploy at a glance, providing superior visibility into your workflow. It’s open source, free to use and download. SPONSORED ...