A note about notes: I will no longer publish the weekly notes file on the website. They are still made available on GitHub as they have been for the past 170 issues. If you’re curious about the why: spam emails that came as a result. Yeah, funny how that works. The Past Week I’m writing this week’s newsletter intro from a Delta 737-900ER high above the western United States. I’m flying back from Seattle, where I had a great week (minus the fatigue and pain; I need to finish physical therapy). On Monday, I got to meet my new team face-to-face. The team is diverse in cultures, experiences, and skill sets. Share opinions on open source, the CNCF, and the Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as answer even the most basic of questions around governance. This is refreshing because I have the chance to help mentor and help people grow, in addition to my day job. I’m fortunate to be working with this wonderful group of folks. ...

A note about Detroit I have heard through the grapevine many folks hating on Detroit as the city of choice for KubeCon NA 2022. Let me shove that theory into the refuse bin for you. Time just named Detroit one of the World’s 50 greatest places of 2022. That’s right, Detroit is dope af, and I can’t wait for you to experience it at KubeCon NA. Ukraine My friends, I’ve checked in on almost every Ukrainian I know during the past two weeks. To a person, they pleaded, “Please let everyone know that there is still a war in Ukraine.” A donation or a link from your socials to Operation Dvoretskyi (named after my friend Ihor Dvoretskyi) means the world to many of my Ukrainian friends. Ukrainians need our continued support. With the world so focused on the outcomes of Russian sanctions, food shortages, inflation, higher fuel costs, etc. We must remember why we all are enduring this. It’s bigger than all of us. It’s for the world. It’s for Europeans. It’s for Ukrainians. These are all messages from my friends that I share with you at their behest. This is how they’ve asked me to help. ...

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. ...