022: Week of 1494129600

Concerns about Kubernetes Community newcomers dominated news this week. An established, well respected member of the Kubernetes community felt unwelcome. Someone they have had bad experiences with in the past was trying to work in the same space the well respected member was in (as part of their day job no less). The community huddled and decided that the new member was not welcome due to past issues. The Kubernetes Team’s decision was a huge sigh of relieve. But this does point to a larger issue with Codes of Conduct and how to enforce them outside of the community. One of my concerns (which I’m still trying to address), is how to handle Code of Conduct violators. Asking them to leave could be met with a, “No.” Then what? Department of Choice Concepts 5 Common Misconceptions of Serverless Technology from DevOps.com (yes, there are still servers) Gene Kim’s 7 secrets of DevOps success: Change often begins in operations DevOps transformations start small — but not too small Business-savvy technologists take the lead DevOps change agents take risks DevOps demands a culture of trust DevOps expansion requires leaders to evolve CIOs are key enablers of DevOps octoDNS is a tool for managing DNS across multiple providers. It allows you to abstract away the complexity of syncing records between DNS providers. Now you can easily diversify your DNS! ...

May 7, 2017 · 5 min · Chris Short

021: Week of 1493524800

North Carolina, and particularly the Triangle area, has had an enormous amount of rain this week. The tiny creek behind our house was a rapid early in the week. According to the USGS, Falls Lake is almost ten feet above it’s average levels. There was one fatality as a result of someone driving around a barricade onto a flooded roadway. Common sense is not common. Please stay safe out there, folks. Meanwhile, back on the DevOps ranch, it was a VERY busy week. I’m on-call for two products this week, working on three projects, writing an article inspired by my VP, submitting CFPs, and trying to keep up with the news. With so much going on let’s get to the DevOps’ish! Department of Choice Concepts Boot an OpenSSH server in 10 mins with LinuxKit: Hands-on guide to use Docker’s LinuxKit to build, run and connect to a bootable Linux system image with OpenSSH. Julia Evans wrote about her favorite shell this week. I just setup fish shell after re-reading Julia’s article. Install, add to /etc/shells, and you’re off and running. Out of the box it’s REALLY awesome. ...

April 30, 2017 · 5 min · Chris Short

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